PARTY PLATFORM
OF THE PROGRESSIVE PARTY OF AMERICA
We the People of the United States, and the Members of the Progressive Party of America, in order to build a Nation, Government and Society that is for the People’s best interest, do ordain and establish this Party Platform for the Progressive Party of America.
We seek a drastically different America than the visions provided by the two corporate parties. We seek an America that is truly brought to the values it was founded on, being that of a fair society for all, as We The People are the words that created the country.
We desire a country that all can thrive in, all can have good lives in, and all can love. A country where our economy sustains us all. A country where equality and justice are the law of the land. A country where people, not money, get to pick their leaders. A country that seeks peace and freedom on all sides of the globe.
Now, more than ever, the United States of America is at a critical moment. We are in a moment where our nation must make a choice about our future. Will it be politics as usual, which has failed our citizens, our people, and ushered in a culture of our rights being stripped and hatred and pain for the average American? Or will it be a future that is equal and just, a future where the people take their country back from the corporations and elites that have shackled our country to the ground, a future where we truly have Justice For All?
One thing is for certain - the Progressive Party will fight for you, and we are going to fight for the good of this country by tooth and nail.
We believe in an America with a democratic economy, where the average person can take their idea to the free market and see it thrive. To that end, the Progressive Party has an ambitious goal to increase small business ownership in the United States by 25%.
We seek to bring small business ownership up by expanding loans available for those hoping to start small businesses, especially in the context of areas affected by the pandemic. Previous business loan programs have ignored poorer communities with higher shares of pandemic-vulnerable businesses, often choosing to spend loans on higher-risk businesses that would bring banks more money rather than investing in communities. The Progressive Party believes in bringing financial assistance to people in overlooked communities and making sure those communities thrive. Thus, we seek to implement programs that right these wrongs and make it easier for members of these communities to get financial assistance to start businesses.
We seek to lower the burdensome taxes that small businesses have to pay to the government. Major corporations are able to use tax breaks to their advantage, but small business tax breaks given by states are narrow, and many small businesses have had to shutter their doors in recent years due to the favoring of big businesses by the government and external factors. The Progressive Party seeks to lower the pass-through entity tax rate and introduce a tiered system for C corporations where small businesses are taxed at a lower rate than big businesses.
We seek to make things easier for small business owners so our free markets can be freed up. There are many regulatory and compliance needs that small business owners in the United States have to deal with, and the exorbitant amounts of red tape they must deal with discourage people from making their voices heard in the democratic economy. The Progressive Party advocates for consolidating these compliance needs, allowing government departments to keep track of everything small businesses need to operate in an easy and accessible place for those who need it.
We believe that anticompetitive behavior is anti-American behavior. Massive megamergers, including the ones between Disney and Fox, Amazon and Whole Foods, and a proposed merger between Kroger and Albertsons, have the potential to cause jobs to be lost, profits to be more concentrated, and communities to be taken advantage of. Due to this, the Progressive Party seeks to use the antitrust powers of the Federal Trade Commission to analyze anticompetitive behavior in the United States and break up the biggest megacorporations participating in anticompetitive behavior, as well as create more rigorous procedures and standards for mergers to follow.
We believe that there is corruption in the Supreme Court, and said corruption needs to end. We seek to have a code of conduct for all federal judges, including the Supreme Court, installed in order to promote true freedom. Additionally, we believe that when confirming a new justice, the President should give three recommendations to the Senate for interviews.
We believe that congressional and state legislature elections have been rigged by politicians from both major parties based on the drawing of unfair district lines, sometimes based on racial and other personal demographic data, but mostly created to give a major party an advantage in an election. In order to create a true democracy in the United States, the Progressive Party believes that the power to redraw election maps must be taken from partisan officials and given to independent citizens redistricting commissions nationwide.
We believe that in the richest country in the world, no person should go without food. While there are many programs that help to reduce hunger in our nation, these are just band-aid solutions to a bullet wound problem, and a Progressive Party government won’t rest until the systemic issues that cause hunger are fixed and hunger is eradicated. The Progressive Party will create incentives to build local grocery stores in food deserts and underserved areas so that no one will have food out of reach because of distance. The Progressive Party will connect communities together, creating community food kitchens to provide storage in areas with fewer resources. The Progressive Party will make SNAP and WIC, as well as other food assistance programs, available in all grocery stores, not just corporate ones, as well as making those benefits accessible in online grocery stores. The Progressive Party will make school breakfast and lunch free for all students nationwide. The Progressive Party will expand food assistance programs to students, immigrants, and those who reside in US territories; raise the age limit for WIC programs to age 6; invest in our country’s food banks; regulate food expiration date labels to ensure that perfectly good food doesn’t end up in a trashcan; break up competition in the food sector; and invest in small businesses in the food industry so that food is accessible for all. Ultimately, we are tired of the platitudes that organizations have put in, claiming that hunger will be ended by a certain year, but no work is being done. The Progressive Party won’t rest on its laurels - it will do the work, and it will fight for you.
We believe that the price increases that have occurred on essential goods such as groceries due to corporations using the pandemic as an excuse to jack up goods are simply un-American. Hunger has already been a problem, but now, groceries are unaffordable for many people, and corporations have even engaged in ‘shrinkflation’, giving consumers less for their buck. With the goal of bringing grocery prices back down to pre-pandemic levels, the Progressive Party supports policies that will investigate the practice of shrinkflation and hold corporations found to be engaging in this practice accountable. Through policies of breaking up megacorporations and supporting small businesses, we hope to achieve the goal of bringing grocery prices back down to pre-pandemic levels.
We believe that the farmers of the United States of America are an important source of food and resources for the entire country. Yet, past governments have been more interested in subsidizing corporate-backed farms rather than supporting independent, hardworking farmers, who have often been ignored by our government. The Progressive Party will revise USDA regulations that prevent schools from procuring local farm-sourced school meals, create programs to put more local produce into independently owned grocery stores and newly built stores in current food deserts, fully fund efforts to expand local farms, and expand assistance for farmers in rural areas in order to expand access to healthy food.
We believe that the current immigration system is broken and that the United States of America’s destabilization of countries in the Global South has exacerbated our immigration crisis. The Progressive Party will work to address the issues at the root cause of this immigration crisis, promote global trade that encourages economic sustainability, and create a more holistic approach to immigration. We will work to expand Customs and Border Protection's ability to process asylum seekers in a timely manner, begin clearing immigration court backlogs, and create new immigration pathways with reasonable wait times. We will work towards mental health solutions that reduce the demand for the import of drugs into the United States, mitigating violence and criminal activity linked to the drug trade.
We believe that the current system of gun control legislation is ineffective. All the while, students and other people are being killed in preventable school shootings, while our politicians debate over taking away guns from people who aren’t misusing them. The Progressive Party believes in ending this public health crisis while protecting our Second Amendment, making sure that there are background checks required for all gun purchases, no matter who the seller is, and that there is a thirty day waiting period on gun purchases, not permitting any sale to go through unless a background check has been completed.
We believe that every American should have equal rights and equal opportunities. The Progressive Party will strengthen existing anti-discrimination legislation, codify equal rights for groups not currently reflected in anti-discrimination law, address systemic inequities like redlining, create programs to help marginalized groups achieve financial parity, and much more - because none of us are free until we all are free.
We believe that while cooperation with other nations and their economies is essential to having a functioning and democratic economy, the current status quo with trade agreements only seeks to reward human rights violations, especially in nations that heavily trade with the United States but are conducting human rights violations of their own. This is because there are no effective mechanisms in place in our current trade agreements to enforce human rights standards. The Progressive Party will renegotiate our trade agreements with, in addition to a stronger focus on empowering locally owned and small businesses in both countries, unique bilateral standards for human rights that both the United States and our trade partners are expected to keep.
We believe that America’s natural beauty deserves to be preserved for future generations. However, sprawling, development, and funding cuts have resulted in a tough time for our natural resources and national parks. We believe that the patriotic thing to do is to preserve, protect, and defend our national parks and other natural resources, and to that end, the Progressive Party commits itself to planning a years-long preservation budget that isn’t at stake every year, so our parks can have a consistent source of funding and banning urban and commercial development on taxpayer-funded and protected public lands so these can be used and protected for generations to come.
We believe that the natural beauty of the United States should be preserved and protected. However, major corporations have been polluting our sources of natural beauty. Energy companies emit massive amounts of greenhouse gases a year, and the top 15 food and beverage corporations emit more greenhouse gases than the country of Australia. However, our government isn’t doing enough to hold them accountable. The Progressive Party will hold them accountable by progressively taxing corporate emissions on the biggest corporations emitting hundreds of thousands of metric tons and using the tax money for environmental preservation efforts, creating third places to connect communities, building walkable cities, and upgrading our public transportation system.
We believe that in order to create community in our country, our public transit system and infrastructure need to be improved. The Progressive Party will make improvements to the Amtrak rail in our country, with more routes dedicated towards transporting the people of our country. We will also get rid of the rule that requires states to match funding of rail routes for our nation, allowing more expansion of railroads, with the goal of building a high-speed rail system. We will encourage state and local governments to invest in intra-city busing systems, fix roads and provide more intra-city rails and subways for easy access to transportation.
We believe that the endless wars that the United States has been engaged in, killing thousands of American soldiers and wasting trillions of our tax dollars, must come to an end. The Progressive Party is committed to repealing outdated authorizations for military force, reigning in the executive’s ability to wage war unilaterally by rebalancing constitutional war powers, ensuring that future authorizations for military force, and using every avenue possible to end our decades-long wars in Iraq, Syria, and Somalia, including increasing funding for peacekeeping efforts worldwide.
As members of the Progressive Party, we believe that we must work towards peace with all nations while securing the interests of human rights globally. We are committed to having peace talks with our adversaries and aggressively negotiating to get the best deal possible, both in terms of human rights in the United States and abroad. However, we will not make new allies and keep existing relationships without being consistent with our expectations for allies and holding all our allies to a standard of conduct and human rights for all as we pursue global peace and security.
We believe that the current system of schools being funded by property taxes is inequitable. The current system prioritizes giving frivolous upgrades to richer schools, while poorer schools have fewer resources. To fund massive upgrades to our public schools, no matter where their ZIP code is, the Progressive Party will tax multi-billion-dollar megacorporations at an additional rate of 2% so every school can function and every student can thrive.
We believe that education in the United States should not be a one-size-fits-all approach. Standardized testing has failed the students of this country, failing to get them equipped for the real world and failing to address different learning styles, especially for students with disabilities. To combat this, the Progressive Party will encourage creative thinking and real-world applications of taught concepts in our schools, slowly phasing out national standardized tests for school funding in favor of applications that showcase a student’s growth and ability to think critically in a way that suits them best.
We believe that an educated society is a powerful society and that everyone deserves access to high-quality education. The literacy rate must rise in our country. Approximately 40% of students in the United States struggle to read at a basic level - a number that should be 0% of students struggling to read at a basic level. The Progressive Party will work with local, state, and national educators to enhance literacy programming for students nationwide so that every student is able to succeed and thrive.
We believe that teachers, those who dedicate their lives to educating our students, youth, and the future of America, have seen a severe lack of pay throughout the country. While some states pay teachers well, other states do not, causing there to be inequality among the states when it comes to teacher retention and other important issues. The Progressive Party will put in place programs to raise teacher pay in the United States at large, working with states and teaching groups to make sure that teachers are able to live well and get paid well for educating our future.
We believe that one of the biggest injustices in our country is that healthcare costs in the United States are significantly higher than in many other developed countries. No one should be paying an arm and a leg just to live, so the Progressive Party will fight for a universal healthcare system to make costs cheaper and save lives in our nation.
We believe that an America where every adult has the confidence to start their own family on their own terms is the America we need. However, a significant number of American adults who don’t plan on having children choose not to have children because they can’t afford to raise a child, and another group has concerns about the state of the world and the protection of our environment. Additionally, unplanned pregnancies that don’t happen on the family’s terms are common because of lack of access to birth control and education on how to start a family. The Progressive Party will create a better environment for Americans to start families on their own terms, both through policies to reduce poverty and protect our environment and by making birth control and family planning education more widely available by including it with the universal healthcare plan. In addition, we will fight for paid parental leave for parents of all genders, expanding WIC to provide for daycare costs for low-income families, preserving a woman’s right to choose, and safeguarding commonsense abortion access nationwide.
We believe that the tax evasion practices that the richest people in the country embark in are unpatriotic and un-American. The wealthy use a variety of tactics to hide their taxes from the world, including the estate tax loophole, the depreciation loophole, strategic uses of tax breaks, government assistance for big corporations, and Roth IRAs. In addition, the rich and powerful are able to use deductions for business expenses for big corporations, investments, property gains, yachts, second homes, stock market investments, capital gains, and sports team ownership. If that isn’t enough, billionaires set up foundations that they claim to be for charity, only to use them as a way to get income tax-free. The Progressive Party will vigorously seek an end to these practices, closing the loopholes the rich and wealthy have used for their own un-American greed for decades and investigating the foundations that have been scamming the nation out of their hard-earned dollars, just for the wealthy to get more cash.
We believe that the current cost-of-living crisis is one of the biggest issues facing America today. Our current rate of inflation caused by the pandemic has made 76% of Americans struggle to pay their bills. More than half of Americans have less than $500 in their savings accounts, and more than 30% of their income is spent just making sure they don’t go without a roof over their heads. There are many root causes to the cost of living crisis, including the anti-patriotic price increases that corporations have put in place under the cover of the pandemic, the lack of affordable housing in this nation, the rising inequalities between the rich and poor, systemic discrimination and pay gaps, and constant layoffs across all industries. The Progressive Party believes one of the most patriotic things that we can fight for is an America where no one has to struggle to afford basic goods, and our policies to end hunger, end homelessness, take on big corporations and free our free markets, lower prices, and invest in all communities, including impoverished ones, will create an America where the cost of living is lowered and no one has to go paycheck to paycheck just to survive.
We believe that the current corporate capture of our government, where 84% of the top corporations in America donate to politicians from both parties, has resulted in an undemocratic system where the government is for the elites, not the people. Additionally, these corporations spend millions lobbying the government a year so they can influence policy for their benefit, not for the public good. The Progressive Party will advocate to safeguard public policy from the whims of corporate interests and amend the Constitution to overturn Citizens United v. FEC, which allows for unlimited corporate spending on elections; Speechnow.org v. FEC, which allows outside political groups to accept unlimited money from corporations; and Buckley v. Valeo and McCutcheon v. FEC, which deem limits to campaign contributions as unconstitutional, to bring true democracy and freedom to the United States. The amendment will allow governments to regulate, limit and/or prohibit campaign contributions to give all citizens equal access to the political process and ensure that no one gains outsized influence on the political process due to their money or spending. The Progressive Party will work with federal, state, and local governments to ban lobbyist donations to elected officials, heavily limit the amount individuals can donate to candidates for office, enforce the existing bans on corporations donating to political candidates directly, and end the current “dark money” flood of campaign contributions by making all donations to political organizations public knowledge and banning corporations from coordinating with and creating PACs.
We believe that a true representative democracy would not allow the same individuals to hold a Congressional seat for long periods of time. However, 11% of Congress has been in office for more than 20 years, and roughly one-third of the House of Representatives has been in office for more than 10 years. Congress is supposed to represent the people, and lengthy terms make it harder for that to happen. The Progressive Party believes in enacting term limits for Congress - 2 terms, or 12 years, for the Senate, and 4 terms, or 8 years, for the House of Representatives. These numbers will provide a fair amount of time for representatives’ voices to be heard while also opening the doors for new voices to be heard as well.
We believe that a true representative democracy also would not allow the people in power to abuse their power for their own financial gain. Unfortunately, this is the case with Congresspeople, as many engage in a practice called insider trading, where they use private information that they use to govern the country to buy and sell stocks of private companies when it is convenient. The Progressive Party stands against the egregious practice and will work to pass into American law that insider trading is prohibited.
We believe that the people of the United States deserve to know who is funding the campaigns of those who are competing to represent the people. However, politically active nonprofits are under no legal obligation to disclose their donors when they spend to influence elections. To fight back against this injustice and provide transparency and clarity to the people of the United States, the Progressive Party supports efforts to make all groups that are spending money to influence elections disclose their donors.
We believe that mass surveillance in the United States, most notably the PATRIOT Act, which was enacted in 2001 and mostly expired in 2020, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which has been repeatedly amended to violate Americans’ privacy in the wake of the September 11th attacks. The post-9/11 attacks on the privacy of the United States have been far-reaching and the antithesis of what “freedom” is supposed to mean in this nation. The Progressive Party will fight to repeal the provisions of the PATRIOT Act that allow for mass surveillance that are still in effect and the post-9/11 amendments to the FISA, giving Americans their freedom back and protecting them from surveillance.
We believe that Americans deserve the right to marry who they want, the right to be free from discrimination, the right to be informed of their rights, and the right to remain silent. These aren’t codified in US law - just Supreme Court cases. The Progressive Party will fight to ensure Obergefell v. Hodges, Loving v. Virginia, Brown v. Board of Education, Miranda v. Arizona, and Salinas v. Texas get codified permanently into US law.
We believe that there should be no new taxes on the middle class and working class and that the spending of the taxpayer money should work to benefit the taxpayers. The Progressive Party will stop the overspending of our government on corporate greed and war and redirect these funds towards human need.