First 100 Days

Brian Czech
President, Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy

 The First Hundred Days:  A Precedent for the Next Hundred Years

 The first thing Greens would do in office is continue leveling with Americans and resonating with their common sense.  We would clarify for all that the Wall Street obsession with economic growth – increasing production and consumption of goods and services – threatens to break our collective back, and has already caused extensive damage.  Instead of more and more of the “stuff” of growth, we need high-quality economic development.  We need an economy that meets all citizens’ needs and provides financial security and health for our communities, kids, and grandkids.  We need an economy that nurtures rather than plunders our environment.  We need a steady state economy, and we would start working toward it on day one.

 After an unprecedented effort to gather input from citizens, communities, and businesses, our ecological economists and other experts would begin the task of prioritizing policies to make the transition to a steady state economy.  We would not make drastic changes overnight, but take a gradual approach to revamp the economy.  The first hundred days would be a start, and the end result would be an economy of sustainable size, fair distribution of wealth, and efficient allocation of resources.

 We would reform the economy by incrementally shifting tax, monetary, and trade policies.  The purpose of the shift would be to harness America’s entrepreneurial spirit and institutional creativity for the enrichment of the whole society.  We would deploy ecological taxes on pollution, resource extraction, and use of natural capital.  We would begin to increase the reserve requirements of banks to transfer control of the money supply from private bankers to the elected government.  We would replace outdated measures of economic output with measures of true economic progress.  Above all else, we would protect the environment, reminding citizens that the environment is the base of the grandkids’ economy.  With a Green Party Administration, a hundred days will help for a hundred years.