Platform
The Progressive Party encompasses a social-democratic and populist platform. The party's main focus has historically been advocacy for a single-payer health care system, which has recently come to fruition through the implementation of Green Mountain Care, a single payer health care program being pushed by Democratic Governor Peter Shumlin, due to pressure from the Progressive Party. Other major policy platforms are renewable energy programs such as a high-speed rail system and a phase-out of nuclear energy, prison reforms to reduce the state's prison population and better protect convict's rights, proposes creation of programs to end homelessness in the state, ending the War on Drugs and repealing No Child Left Behind and ending the focus on standardized testing in the school system. The party also has an anti-war stance, advocating for Vermont's national guard to be restricted from engaging in war zones, an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and opposes all preemptive strikes. The party is very supportive of LGBT rights, and members of the party were involved in the legalization of gay marriage in the state.
Economically, the party also calls for converting the minimum wage to a living wage, having the economy focus on small and local businesses, empowerment of worker cooperatives and publicly-owned companies as democratic alternatives to multi-national corporations and to decentralize the economy, for the strengthening of state law to protect the right to unionize, for implementing a progressive income tax and repealing the Capital Gains Tax Exemption and residential education property tax and all trade to be subject to international standards on human rights. The party is also critical of privatization.
Read more about this topic: Vermont Progressive Party
Famous quotes containing the word platform:
“I have never yet spoken from a public platform about women in industry that someone has not said, “But things are far better than they used to be.” I confess to impatience with persons who are satisfied with a dangerously slow tempo of progress for half of society in an age which requires a much faster tempo than in the days that “used to be.” Let us use what might be instead of what has been as our yardstick!”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“... a Christian has neither more nor less rights in our association than an atheist. When our platform becomes too narrow for people of all creeds and of no creeds, I myself cannot stand upon it.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)
“I have rather a strange objection to talking from the back platform of a train.... It changes too often. It moves around and shifts its ground too often. I like a platform that stays put.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)