"Be Realistic. Demand The Impossible" - "Situationist" slogan, 1968
Demand No. 1: The $30-per-hour minimum wage
Not phased in over so many years that today's $30 is worth $20 by the time it takes effect. Thirty dollars an hour for all workers, no exceptions, now. This is an eminently reasonable demand. If anything, it's too little to ask. The current federal minimum wage, $7.25, is a sick joke. Congress' abdication of its moral duty to reward American workers for their extraordinary productivity by increasing the minimum wage at or faster than inflation has eroded the base salary since the Vietnam era. Corporate profits have soared as workers' wages have stagnated.
The federal minimum wage was $1.60 in 1968. Adjusting for the official inflation rate, that's $30.00 today. Let's party like it's 1968.
Demand No. 2: Free national health care
Not market-based, not a hybrid. We need real, actual, universal health care. Every nurse and every doctor becomes a federal employee. Health insurance vanishes as a business sector. Every checkup, every test, every doctor's visit, every medication, every surgical procedure is fully covered, no questions asked, as long as it's approved by a physician.
This is not too much to ask. Germany, where only 0.5% of the population is uninsured, pays only 10.7% of GDP for health care, compared to 16% here in the U.S. Norway, where hospitals are operated by the government, has a $210 per citizen per year deductible after which the government picks up the tab for everything; like Germany, overall health care costs in Norway are about 60% of ours.
Throw in dental, vision, and mental health.
Demand No. 3: Slash military spending by 80%
We're not the world's policeman. We're its deranged serial killer. The U.S. squanders $800 billion a year to invade, occupy, assassinate, intimidate and bomb people who mean us no harm and destroy their infrastructure. That's more than the next nine biggest-spending militarist nations combined. And those countries total 10 times our population.
Slashing the Pentagon budget would make the world safer. Fewer U.S. wars and proxy wars would reduce anti-Americanism and thus reduce the chance of another terrorist attack, save thousands of American lives and millions of people overseas, not to mention massively helping out the environment.
Those savings would easily cover:
Demand No. 4: Free four-year college.
Young Americans have long been coerced into a devil's bargain: Without a college degree, they've been told, you won't land a decent-paying job. College is insanely expensive, so you'll have to accept the burden of student loan debt. If you don't make enough money after graduation due to bad luck or a bad economy or a changing workplace, too bad, you still have to pay. You can't even discharge the loans in bankruptcy.
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