Exploratory draft · Presented for reading and discussion.
Economic Framework
The economy should be governed by public purpose and real capacity. At the federal level, the relevant limits on public action are available labor, materials, energy, productive capacity, imports, and inflation—not an artificial requirement that national spending behave like a household budget. When resources are idle, public investment should mobilize them. When resources are scarce, government should expand capacity, reduce monopoly power, redirect production, or moderate demand. California and other state governments must additionally work within their own revenue, borrowing, and balanced-budget constraints.
01Guarantee the human essentials
Establish enforceable universal guarantees for safe housing, medical care, nutritious food, clean water, education, physical safety, and access to essential communication. These protections should apply to every person, regardless of citizenship or immigration status.
02Build housing as public infrastructure
Expand public, cooperative, and nonprofit housing; protect tenants from displacement; reduce speculative extraction from housing; and ensure that no person or family is left without safe shelter.
03Make healthcare a public right
Guarantee comprehensive physical, mental, dental, reproductive, preventive, and emergency care. Permit private participation only within a system that prioritizes patient need, transparent costs, continuity of care, and public accountability.
04End hunger through universal provision
Guarantee reliable access to nutritious food through public benefits, school and community meal programs, direct support, and resilient local food systems. Charity may supplement this work but must not determine who eats.
05Provide universal, lifelong education
Fund high-quality public education from early childhood through adult and vocational learning. Education should develop civic judgment, practical capability, creativity, health, and human understanding—not serve only as job training.
06Guarantee useful work and share the gains of automation
Establish a federally funded job guarantee for anyone willing and able to work, with useful jobs in care, education, public health, environmental restoration, infrastructure, and community services. Use productivity gains from artificial intelligence and automation to reduce working hours, strengthen income security, expand universal services, and create pathways to shared ownership. Employment should not be required to receive basic rights.
07Give people power at work and in ownership
Strengthen collective bargaining, portable benefits, worker representation in automation decisions, employee ownership, cooperatives, profit-sharing, social wealth funds, and democratic participation in major economic institutions. Ensure that the public receives a fair share of productivity gains created with public resources.
08Put essential systems under public accountability
End the use of private profit as the primary governing principle in prisons, detention, core healthcare, essential utilities, basic housing, public education, and critical digital or AI infrastructure. Providers must meet universal standards and remain answerable to the public.
09Protect democratic control of AI and data
Require transparency, human review, appeal rights, privacy protection, provenance where practical, and clear responsibility for consequential automated decisions. Prevent monopolistic control of systems that determine access to employment, housing, healthcare, education, credit, or public benefits.
10Make democracy materially real and economically stable
Fund these guarantees through a fair contribution from concentrated wealth, monopoly rents, land and resource extraction, and automation-driven gains. Manage inflation by expanding productive capacity, addressing bottlenecks and supply dependence, curbing monopoly pricing and speculation, and using targeted fiscal measures when necessary—not by treating unemployment as the default price of stability. Measure national success by security, health, education, time, agency, price stability, and shared prosperity—not by growth alone.