Bernie Sanders
Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders broke into the national consciousness on a powerful far-left platform in 2016. Sanders founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus in 1991. He draws urgency on issues like income inequality and workers' rights from his jobs as a union carpenter and his participation in the Civil Rights Movement while he was a student at the University of Chicago. As a senator, Sanders is an Independent but caucuses with the Democrats.
One of the most important aspects of Sanders' candidacy for his supporters is the consistency of his positions and beliefs. His long tenure in the capitol is marked by a loyalty to the progressive policies he has advocated for for decades. While he began as the only advocate for some of them, many of Sanders' policies and ideas have been assimilated into the mainstream Democratic platform, like Medicare for All and free college tuition.
Sanders' opponents say his sweeping policies lack funding and are too ambitious in light of the political climate. However, he believes that the big challenges facing the country require proposals at the scale necessary to solve them, especially the dire threat of the climate crisis, health care, and income inequality.
Sanders' supporters say he can build the broadest coalition through his populist message and ability to bring new people into the political process - especially young people - who don't often vote.
Candidates are broadly in favor of repealing Trump's rollbacks to the Clean Water Rule and other environmental protections, as well as rejoining the Paris Climate Accord and increasing U.S. investments abroad in the global climate fight.
Washington state is already on track to reach 100 percent clean electricity generation by 2045, thanks to the clean energy law passed last year. Most of the presidential candidates' clean energy goals aim for clean electricity even sooner than our standard.
Among all the candidates, Sanders has one of the most ambitious climate plans. He is aiming for 100 percent renewable energy for transportation and electricity no later than 2030, with complete decarbonization by 2050. His $16.3 trillion plan is the costliest, but his campaign estimates that it would provide 20 million jobs and cover nearly every aspect of the climate crisis.
Sanders is promising to create a $40 billion Climate Justice Resiliency Fund that would help frontline communities, including communities of color, Native communities, the elderly, people with disabilities, and other underserved groups. The fund would help communities navigate an energy revolution with access to jobs and economic development. Another $2.18 trillion would go towards grant assistance for families with low and moderate incomes to weatherize and retrofit their homes. Major national investments would include conservation efforts, research and development, and transit and drinking water system renovations.
Sanders and Warren are the only major candidates who have pledged to ban fracking outright, with Buttigieg seeking to ban new fracking permits and phase out current fracking sites.
Broadly, Democratic candidates are on board with tackling popular reforms like protections against surprise billing and fighting back against rising drug costs. The biggest discussion this election centers on the possibility of implementing Medicare for All. It's unclear what the cost or savings of the Medicare for All proposal would be. However, the United States currently spends more than any other country in the world on health care, a total of $3.5 trillion in 2017 - twice what other industrialized countries spend. Competent health care reform could mean life-saving, complete, accessible coverage for the nation for much less than we currently pay.
Overall, Washington state generally ranks in the top ten for its overall health. One of the most-cited areas where needs still need to be met is mental health care.
Sanders introduced and originally wrote the Medicare for All legislation, a single-payer plan that would largely get rid of private health care options. He contrasts his version of Medicare for All with Warren's by saying that if he is elected, he would implement the policy in his first week in office with a phased roll-out over four years.
In single-payer programs, the government pays for and provides everyone insurance, as opposed to the current model where payment may come from a state, private insurance companies, or federal Medicare. With Medicare for All, all Americans would be automatically enrolled into the healthcare plan; healthcare providers and facilities would remain independent and would be paid by the healthcare plan. Sanders' health care program as proposed would cover every American and be free at the point of service, and would include vision and dental care as well.
All of the featured candidates support raising the federal minimum wage to $15.
Washington state recently became the fifth state to offer workers paid family leave - up to 12 weeks of it for taking care of a sick family member or themselves, or for welcoming a new child.
Sanders is a co-sponsor of the FAMILY Act, but beyond that would guarantee 6 months of family leave as recommended by World Health Organization. His pre-K plan starts at 3 years old, and his Foundations for Success Act would allow all children to receive child care and early education access from 6 weeks old to kindergarten.
Sanders' labor platform is very extensive. Like Warren, he supports sectoral bargaining, ending worker misclassification, extension of labor laws to domestic and farm workers, and allowing government workers to strike. He also wants to give workers ownership in their companies. He has proposed allowing those working for companies with at least $100 million in annual revenue, as well as publicly traded companies, to have ownership. Most notably, Sanders' plan calls for an end to at-will employment. If this legislation were to pass, employers could only terminate workers with "just cause" based on their performance at their job.
Democratic candidates this year will need to raise a large amount of revenue to power their ambitious agendas on health care, climate action, education, and more. Candidates are considering some combination of higher corporate taxes, higher taxes on capital gains, repealing Trump's tax plan for the wealthy, or a wealth tax.
Sanders is proposing an "Extreme Wealth Tax," a tax on top 0.1 of wealthiest Americans with a net worth of over $32 million. He also wants to establish a federal jobs guarantee and would raise taxes on businesses whose CEOs make at least 50 times that of their median worker. In October 2019, Sanders declared that he does not plan to release a detailed plan of how he'll pay for Medicare for All, opting instead to publish a list of options of how to pay for it. Though he says that the middle class will pay more taxes, Sanders also asserts that savings on from Medicare for All will ultimately mean paying less.
Housing policy and homelessness ranked as the number one concerns of residents across Washington in a recent Crosscut/Elway poll. Though the state Legislature and local governments are trying to tackle the issue, a lack of affordable housing exacerbated by income inequality have left many in our region without consistent, reliable, inclusive, and accessible services that would help our communities thrive.
Sanders' Green New Deal for Public Housing exemplifies his strong belief that affordable homes are a fundamental right, and that public housing is a national asset that we should improve and expand upon. Like Warren, he would work to stop the criminalization of the homeless and would spend $32 billion over five years to end homelessness, including doubling grants for permanent supportive housing.
He is aiming to repeal the Faircloth Amendment to allow the construction of new public housing units, make a $70 billion investment into repairing and modernizing our current public housing stock with energy retrofits, high-quality community spaces, and high-speed internet.
His administration would also expand the National Housing Trust Fund, which builds homes for people with low incomes and fully fund Section 8 housing.
Not confined to a single category of policies, overturning centuries of segregation, systematic harm, and intentional destabilization of communities of color requires a tremendous amount of awareness, political will, time, and funding. Many candidates have woven racial justice into their plans, but still need to address past issues or build current platforms.
Sanders' racial justice policies are woven throughout his platforms. Some of the biggest reforms include re-enfranchising the formerly incarcerated with the right to vote, ending private prisons and mandatory minimums, guaranteeing a job to every American, ending healthcare disparities, and addressing gentrification.
Sanders supports the use of the 10-20-30 approach to federal investments, which focuses "at least 10 percent of total investments to counties where at least 20 percent of the population has lived under the federal poverty line for at least 30 years."
For K-12 education, Sanders is proposing a slate of policies aimed at bringing American education up from its global ranking in the 11th spot. Sanders' plan to triple Title I funding for low-income schools is similar to Biden's, but goes much further by investing in a more complete educational revamp. He would enforce school desegregation and fund teacher-training programs to increase educator diversity, ban for-profit charters and stop charter school construction until a national audit is complete, raise teacher salaries and triple educator's tax deductions for out-of-pocket classroom expenses, provide free universal meals in schools, and much more.
Sanders would forgive all $1.6 trillion in student debt for 45 million Americans in addition to making public colleges and universities, trade schools, minority serving institutions, and historically black colleges and universities free.
Every candidate in the Democratic primary has made commitments to fix the country's aging infrastructure. While Washington state has a C grade for infrastructure from the American Society of Civil Engineers, we can also expect that Eyman's disastrous I-976 will drastically cut the transportation budgets for many Washington cities, making presidential infrastructure plans more important than ever.
Sanders is calling for a $1 trillion investment into American infrastructure, noting that the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave the United States a cumulative grade of D+ for the current state of our infrastructure. As part of his Green New Deal plan, he plans to make investments into bridge and road repair, water systems, railways, and more. Much of the funds for these infrastructure plans would come from closing a corporate loophole that allows multinational U.S. companies to stash profits in overseas banks.
All of the current major candidates have said that they would extend citizenship to Dreamers, immigrants who arrived to the U.S. as children. In addition, the candidates are in sync about stopping family separation, though their methods differ.
Washington state currently has a patchwork of protections for immigrants in the form of sanctuary cities. However, deportations, ICE raids, and other incursions by federal law enforcement remain a problem in many communities, especially in agricultural regions of the state.
Sanders would break up ICE and Customs and Border Patrol and redistribute their roles to other organizations such as the Department of Justice. In addition, he would go a step further by calling for a moratorium on deportations until his administration completed an audit of current and past immigration policies.
Sanders' health care plan would cover undocumented residents as well as citizens. He also has extensive plans for racial equity, including strengthening labor laws for immigrant workers, including a $15 minimum wage for agricultural workers and a bill of rights for domestic workers. Sanders would provide a path to legal permanent status and citizenship within five years for the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the country.
All of the featured candidates support the Equality Act, as well as rolling back Trump's erosion of LGBTQ+ rights, such as the transgender military ban and religious exemption policies that allow LGTBQ discrimination on religious grounds.
Unless otherwise mentioned, candidates are also pledging to limit Title IX exemptions for religious schools. These regulations allow a recipient institution to exclude, separate, deny benefits to, or otherwise treat students differently on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation in enrollment or education programs.
In his implementation of Medicare for all, Sanders vows to confront the health disparities across the LGBTQ populations. He would work to ensure available mental health care, access to PrEP, a highly effective daily medication for prevention of HIV, gender affirming health care. On education, he also states that he will help LGBTQ students by passing the Safe Schools Improvement Act and the Student Non-Discrimination Act.
Abroad, he pledges to assist in the worldwide protection of LGTBQ people with "strong and binding" human rights standards.
Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders broke into the national consciousness on a powerful far-left platform in 2016. Sanders founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus in 1991. He draws urgency on issues like income inequality and workers' rights from his jobs as a union carpenter and his participation in the Civil Rights Movement while he was a student at the University of Chicago. As a senator, Sanders is an Independent but caucuses with the Democrats.
One of the most important aspects of Sanders' candidacy for his supporters is the consistency of his positions and beliefs. His long tenure in the capitol is marked by a loyalty to the progressive policies he has advocated for for decades. While he began as the only advocate for some of them, many of Sanders' policies and ideas have been assimilated into the mainstream Democratic platform, like Medicare for All and free college tuition.
Sanders' opponents say his sweeping policies lack funding and are too ambitious in light of the political climate. However, he believes that the big challenges facing the country require proposals at the scale necessary to solve them, especially the dire threat of the climate crisis, health care, and income inequality.
Sanders' supporters say he can build the broadest coalition through his populist message and ability to bring new people into the political process - especially young people - who don't often vote.
Candidates are broadly in favor of repealing Trump's rollbacks to the Clean Water Rule and other environmental protections, as well as rejoining the Paris Climate Accord and increasing U.S. investments abroad in the global climate fight.
Washington state is already on track to reach 100 percent clean electricity generation by 2045, thanks to the clean energy law passed last year. Most of the presidential candidates' clean energy goals aim for clean electricity even sooner than our standard.
Among all the candidates, Sanders has one of the most ambitious climate plans. He is aiming for 100 percent renewable energy for transportation and electricity no later than 2030, with complete decarbonization by 2050. His $16.3 trillion plan is the costliest, but his campaign estimates that it would provide 20 million jobs and cover nearly every aspect of the climate crisis.
Sanders is promising to create a $40 billion Climate Justice Resiliency Fund that would help frontline communities, including communities of color, Native communities, the elderly, people with disabilities, and other underserved groups. The fund would help communities navigate an energy revolution with access to jobs and economic development. Another $2.18 trillion would go towards grant assistance for families with low and moderate incomes to weatherize and retrofit their homes. Major national investments would include conservation efforts, research and development, and transit and drinking water system renovations.
Sanders and Warren are the only major candidates who have pledged to ban fracking outright, with Buttigieg seeking to ban new fracking permits and phase out current fracking sites.
Broadly, Democratic candidates are on board with tackling popular reforms like protections against surprise billing and fighting back against rising drug costs. The biggest discussion this election centers on the possibility of implementing Medicare for All. It's unclear what the cost or savings of the Medicare for All proposal would be. However, the United States currently spends more than any other country in the world on health care, a total of $3.5 trillion in 2017 - twice what other industrialized countries spend. Competent health care reform could mean life-saving, complete, accessible coverage for the nation for much less than we currently pay.
Overall, Washington state generally ranks in the top ten for its overall health. One of the most-cited areas where needs still need to be met is mental health care.
Sanders introduced and originally wrote the Medicare for All legislation, a single-payer plan that would largely get rid of private health care options. He contrasts his version of Medicare for All with Warren's by saying that if he is elected, he would implement the policy in his first week in office with a phased roll-out over four years.
In single-payer programs, the government pays for and provides everyone insurance, as opposed to the current model where payment may come from a state, private insurance companies, or federal Medicare. With Medicare for All, all Americans would be automatically enrolled into the healthcare plan; healthcare providers and facilities would remain independent and would be paid by the healthcare plan. Sanders' health care program as proposed would cover every American and be free at the point of service, and would include vision and dental care as well.
All of the featured candidates support raising the federal minimum wage to $15.
Washington state recently became the fifth state to offer workers paid family leave - up to 12 weeks of it for taking care of a sick family member or themselves, or for welcoming a new child.
Sanders is a co-sponsor of the FAMILY Act, but beyond that would guarantee 6 months of family leave as recommended by World Health Organization. His pre-K plan starts at 3 years old, and his Foundations for Success Act would allow all children to receive child care and early education access from 6 weeks old to kindergarten.
Sanders' labor platform is very extensive. Like Warren, he supports sectoral bargaining, ending worker misclassification, extension of labor laws to domestic and farm workers, and allowing government workers to strike. He also wants to give workers ownership in their companies. He has proposed allowing those working for companies with at least $100 million in annual revenue, as well as publicly traded companies, to have ownership. Most notably, Sanders' plan calls for an end to at-will employment. If this legislation were to pass, employers could only terminate workers with "just cause" based on their performance at their job.
Democratic candidates this year will need to raise a large amount of revenue to power their ambitious agendas on health care, climate action, education, and more. Candidates are considering some combination of higher corporate taxes, higher taxes on capital gains, repealing Trump's tax plan for the wealthy, or a wealth tax.
Sanders is proposing an "Extreme Wealth Tax," a tax on top 0.1 of wealthiest Americans with a net worth of over $32 million. He also wants to establish a federal jobs guarantee and would raise taxes on businesses whose CEOs make at least 50 times that of their median worker. In October 2019, Sanders declared that he does not plan to release a detailed plan of how he'll pay for Medicare for All, opting instead to publish a list of options of how to pay for it. Though he says that the middle class will pay more taxes, Sanders also asserts that savings on from Medicare for All will ultimately mean paying less.
Housing policy and homelessness ranked as the number one concerns of residents across Washington in a recent Crosscut/Elway poll. Though the state Legislature and local governments are trying to tackle the issue, a lack of affordable housing exacerbated by income inequality have left many in our region without consistent, reliable, inclusive, and accessible services that would help our communities thrive.
Sanders' Green New Deal for Public Housing exemplifies his strong belief that affordable homes are a fundamental right, and that public housing is a national asset that we should improve and expand upon. Like Warren, he would work to stop the criminalization of the homeless and would spend $32 billion over five years to end homelessness, including doubling grants for permanent supportive housing.
He is aiming to repeal the Faircloth Amendment to allow the construction of new public housing units, make a $70 billion investment into repairing and modernizing our current public housing stock with energy retrofits, high-quality community spaces, and high-speed internet.
His administration would also expand the National Housing Trust Fund, which builds homes for people with low incomes and fully fund Section 8 housing.
Not confined to a single category of policies, overturning centuries of segregation, systematic harm, and intentional destabilization of communities of color requires a tremendous amount of awareness, political will, time, and funding. Many candidates have woven racial justice into their plans, but still need to address past issues or build current platforms.
Sanders' racial justice policies are woven throughout his platforms. Some of the biggest reforms include re-enfranchising the formerly incarcerated with the right to vote, ending private prisons and mandatory minimums, guaranteeing a job to every American, ending healthcare disparities, and addressing gentrification.
Sanders supports the use of the 10-20-30 approach to federal investments, which focuses "at least 10 percent of total investments to counties where at least 20 percent of the population has lived under the federal poverty line for at least 30 years."
For K-12 education, Sanders is proposing a slate of policies aimed at bringing American education up from its global ranking in the 11th spot. Sanders' plan to triple Title I funding for low-income schools is similar to Biden's, but goes much further by investing in a more complete educational revamp. He would enforce school desegregation and fund teacher-training programs to increase educator diversity, ban for-profit charters and stop charter school construction until a national audit is complete, raise teacher salaries and triple educator's tax deductions for out-of-pocket classroom expenses, provide free universal meals in schools, and much more.
Sanders would forgive all $1.6 trillion in student debt for 45 million Americans in addition to making public colleges and universities, trade schools, minority serving institutions, and historically black colleges and universities free.
Every candidate in the Democratic primary has made commitments to fix the country's aging infrastructure. While Washington state has a C grade for infrastructure from the American Society of Civil Engineers, we can also expect that Eyman's disastrous I-976 will drastically cut the transportation budgets for many Washington cities, making presidential infrastructure plans more important than ever.
Sanders is calling for a $1 trillion investment into American infrastructure, noting that the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave the United States a cumulative grade of D+ for the current state of our infrastructure. As part of his Green New Deal plan, he plans to make investments into bridge and road repair, water systems, railways, and more. Much of the funds for these infrastructure plans would come from closing a corporate loophole that allows multinational U.S. companies to stash profits in overseas banks.
All of the current major candidates have said that they would extend citizenship to Dreamers, immigrants who arrived to the U.S. as children. In addition, the candidates are in sync about stopping family separation, though their methods differ.
Washington state currently has a patchwork of protections for immigrants in the form of sanctuary cities. However, deportations, ICE raids, and other incursions by federal law enforcement remain a problem in many communities, especially in agricultural regions of the state.
Sanders would break up ICE and Customs and Border Patrol and redistribute their roles to other organizations such as the Department of Justice. In addition, he would go a step further by calling for a moratorium on deportations until his administration completed an audit of current and past immigration policies.
Sanders' health care plan would cover undocumented residents as well as citizens. He also has extensive plans for racial equity, including strengthening labor laws for immigrant workers, including a $15 minimum wage for agricultural workers and a bill of rights for domestic workers. Sanders would provide a path to legal permanent status and citizenship within five years for the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the country.
All of the featured candidates support the Equality Act, as well as rolling back Trump's erosion of LGBTQ+ rights, such as the transgender military ban and religious exemption policies that allow LGTBQ discrimination on religious grounds.
Unless otherwise mentioned, candidates are also pledging to limit Title IX exemptions for religious schools. These regulations allow a recipient institution to exclude, separate, deny benefits to, or otherwise treat students differently on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation in enrollment or education programs.
In his implementation of Medicare for all, Sanders vows to confront the health disparities across the LGBTQ populations. He would work to ensure available mental health care, access to PrEP, a highly effective daily medication for prevention of HIV, gender affirming health care. On education, he also states that he will help LGBTQ students by passing the Safe Schools Improvement Act and the Student Non-Discrimination Act.
Abroad, he pledges to assist in the worldwide protection of LGTBQ people with "strong and binding" human rights standards.
Bernie Sanders
Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders broke into the national consciousness on a powerful far-left platform in 2016. Sanders founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus in 1991. He draws urgency on issues like income inequality and workers' rights from his jobs as a union carpenter and his participation in the Civil Rights Movement while he was a student at the University of Chicago. As a senator, Sanders is an Independent but caucuses with the Democrats.
One of the most important aspects of Sanders' candidacy for his supporters is the consistency of his positions and beliefs. His long tenure in the capitol is marked by a loyalty to the progressive policies he has advocated for for decades. While he began as the only advocate for some of them, many of Sanders' policies and ideas have been assimilated into the mainstream Democratic platform, like Medicare for All and free college tuition.
Sanders' opponents say his sweeping policies lack funding and are too ambitious in light of the political climate. However, he believes that the big challenges facing the country require proposals at the scale necessary to solve them, especially the dire threat of the climate crisis, health care, and income inequality.
Sanders' supporters say he can build the broadest coalition through his populist message and ability to bring new people into the political process - especially young people - who don't often vote.
Candidates are broadly in favor of repealing Trump's rollbacks to the Clean Water Rule and other environmental protections, as well as rejoining the Paris Climate Accord and increasing U.S. investments abroad in the global climate fight.
Washington state is already on track to reach 100 percent clean electricity generation by 2045, thanks to the clean energy law passed last year. Most of the presidential candidates' clean energy goals aim for clean electricity even sooner than our standard.
Among all the candidates, Sanders has one of the most ambitious climate plans. He is aiming for 100 percent renewable energy for transportation and electricity no later than 2030, with complete decarbonization by 2050. His $16.3 trillion plan is the costliest, but his campaign estimates that it would provide 20 million jobs and cover nearly every aspect of the climate crisis.
Sanders is promising to create a $40 billion Climate Justice Resiliency Fund that would help frontline communities, including communities of color, Native communities, the elderly, people with disabilities, and other underserved groups. The fund would help communities navigate an energy revolution with access to jobs and economic development. Another $2.18 trillion would go towards grant assistance for families with low and moderate incomes to weatherize and retrofit their homes. Major national investments would include conservation efforts, research and development, and transit and drinking water system renovations.
Sanders and Warren are the only major candidates who have pledged to ban fracking outright, with Buttigieg seeking to ban new fracking permits and phase out current fracking sites.
Broadly, Democratic candidates are on board with tackling popular reforms like protections against surprise billing and fighting back against rising drug costs. The biggest discussion this election centers on the possibility of implementing Medicare for All. It's unclear what the cost or savings of the Medicare for All proposal would be. However, the United States currently spends more than any other country in the world on health care, a total of $3.5 trillion in 2017 - twice what other industrialized countries spend. Competent health care reform could mean life-saving, complete, accessible coverage for the nation for much less than we currently pay.
Overall, Washington state generally ranks in the top ten for its overall health. One of the most-cited areas where needs still need to be met is mental health care.
Sanders introduced and originally wrote the Medicare for All legislation, a single-payer plan that would largely get rid of private health care options. He contrasts his version of Medicare for All with Warren's by saying that if he is elected, he would implement the policy in his first week in office with a phased roll-out over four years.
In single-payer programs, the government pays for and provides everyone insurance, as opposed to the current model where payment may come from a state, private insurance companies, or federal Medicare. With Medicare for All, all Americans would be automatically enrolled into the healthcare plan; healthcare providers and facilities would remain independent and would be paid by the healthcare plan. Sanders' health care program as proposed would cover every American and be free at the point of service, and would include vision and dental care as well.
All of the featured candidates support raising the federal minimum wage to $15.
Washington state recently became the fifth state to offer workers paid family leave - up to 12 weeks of it for taking care of a sick family member or themselves, or for welcoming a new child.
Sanders is a co-sponsor of the FAMILY Act, but beyond that would guarantee 6 months of family leave as recommended by World Health Organization. His pre-K plan starts at 3 years old, and his Foundations for Success Act would allow all children to receive child care and early education access from 6 weeks old to kindergarten.
Sanders' labor platform is very extensive. Like Warren, he supports sectoral bargaining, ending worker misclassification, extension of labor laws to domestic and farm workers, and allowing government workers to strike. He also wants to give workers ownership in their companies. He has proposed allowing those working for companies with at least $100 million in annual revenue, as well as publicly traded companies, to have ownership. Most notably, Sanders' plan calls for an end to at-will employment. If this legislation were to pass, employers could only terminate workers with "just cause" based on their performance at their job.
Democratic candidates this year will need to raise a large amount of revenue to power their ambitious agendas on health care, climate action, education, and more. Candidates are considering some combination of higher corporate taxes, higher taxes on capital gains, repealing Trump's tax plan for the wealthy, or a wealth tax.
Sanders is proposing an "Extreme Wealth Tax," a tax on top 0.1 of wealthiest Americans with a net worth of over $32 million. He also wants to establish a federal jobs guarantee and would raise taxes on businesses whose CEOs make at least 50 times that of their median worker. In October 2019, Sanders declared that he does not plan to release a detailed plan of how he'll pay for Medicare for All, opting instead to publish a list of options of how to pay for it. Though he says that the middle class will pay more taxes, Sanders also asserts that savings on from Medicare for All will ultimately mean paying less.
Housing policy and homelessness ranked as the number one concerns of residents across Washington in a recent Crosscut/Elway poll. Though the state Legislature and local governments are trying to tackle the issue, a lack of affordable housing exacerbated by income inequality have left many in our region without consistent, reliable, inclusive, and accessible services that would help our communities thrive.
Sanders' Green New Deal for Public Housing exemplifies his strong belief that affordable homes are a fundamental right, and that public housing is a national asset that we should improve and expand upon. Like Warren, he would work to stop the criminalization of the homeless and would spend $32 billion over five years to end homelessness, including doubling grants for permanent supportive housing.
He is aiming to repeal the Faircloth Amendment to allow the construction of new public housing units, make a $70 billion investment into repairing and modernizing our current public housing stock with energy retrofits, high-quality community spaces, and high-speed internet.
His administration would also expand the National Housing Trust Fund, which builds homes for people with low incomes and fully fund Section 8 housing.
Not confined to a single category of policies, overturning centuries of segregation, systematic harm, and intentional destabilization of communities of color requires a tremendous amount of awareness, political will, time, and funding. Many candidates have woven racial justice into their plans, but still need to address past issues or build current platforms.
Sanders' racial justice policies are woven throughout his platforms. Some of the biggest reforms include re-enfranchising the formerly incarcerated with the right to vote, ending private prisons and mandatory minimums, guaranteeing a job to every American, ending healthcare disparities, and addressing gentrification.
Sanders supports the use of the 10-20-30 approach to federal investments, which focuses "at least 10 percent of total investments to counties where at least 20 percent of the population has lived under the federal poverty line for at least 30 years."
For K-12 education, Sanders is proposing a slate of policies aimed at bringing American education up from its global ranking in the 11th spot. Sanders' plan to triple Title I funding for low-income schools is similar to Biden's, but goes much further by investing in a more complete educational revamp. He would enforce school desegregation and fund teacher-training programs to increase educator diversity, ban for-profit charters and stop charter school construction until a national audit is complete, raise teacher salaries and triple educator's tax deductions for out-of-pocket classroom expenses, provide free universal meals in schools, and much more.
Sanders would forgive all $1.6 trillion in student debt for 45 million Americans in addition to making public colleges and universities, trade schools, minority serving institutions, and historically black colleges and universities free.
Every candidate in the Democratic primary has made commitments to fix the country's aging infrastructure. While Washington state has a C grade for infrastructure from the American Society of Civil Engineers, we can also expect that Eyman's disastrous I-976 will drastically cut the transportation budgets for many Washington cities, making presidential infrastructure plans more important than ever.
Sanders is calling for a $1 trillion investment into American infrastructure, noting that the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave the United States a cumulative grade of D+ for the current state of our infrastructure. As part of his Green New Deal plan, he plans to make investments into bridge and road repair, water systems, railways, and more. Much of the funds for these infrastructure plans would come from closing a corporate loophole that allows multinational U.S. companies to stash profits in overseas banks.
All of the current major candidates have said that they would extend citizenship to Dreamers, immigrants who arrived to the U.S. as children. In addition, the candidates are in sync about stopping family separation, though their methods differ.
Washington state currently has a patchwork of protections for immigrants in the form of sanctuary cities. However, deportations, ICE raids, and other incursions by federal law enforcement remain a problem in many communities, especially in agricultural regions of the state.
Sanders would break up ICE and Customs and Border Patrol and redistribute their roles to other organizations such as the Department of Justice. In addition, he would go a step further by calling for a moratorium on deportations until his administration completed an audit of current and past immigration policies.
Sanders' health care plan would cover undocumented residents as well as citizens. He also has extensive plans for racial equity, including strengthening labor laws for immigrant workers, including a $15 minimum wage for agricultural workers and a bill of rights for domestic workers. Sanders would provide a path to legal permanent status and citizenship within five years for the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the country.
All of the featured candidates support the Equality Act, as well as rolling back Trump's erosion of LGBTQ+ rights, such as the transgender military ban and religious exemption policies that allow LGTBQ discrimination on religious grounds.
Unless otherwise mentioned, candidates are also pledging to limit Title IX exemptions for religious schools. These regulations allow a recipient institution to exclude, separate, deny benefits to, or otherwise treat students differently on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation in enrollment or education programs.
In his implementation of Medicare for all, Sanders vows to confront the health disparities across the LGBTQ populations. He would work to ensure available mental health care, access to PrEP, a highly effective daily medication for prevention of HIV, gender affirming health care. On education, he also states that he will help LGBTQ students by passing the Safe Schools Improvement Act and the Student Non-Discrimination Act.
Abroad, he pledges to assist in the worldwide protection of LGTBQ people with "strong and binding" human rights standards.
