Stronger Together

Hillary Rodham Clinton, Tim Kaine

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501161742
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Campañas políticas y elecciones

For more than a year, Hillary Clinton has laid out an ambitious agenda to improve the lives of the American people and make our country stronger and safer. Stronger Together presents that agenda in full, relating stories from the American people and outlining the Clinton/Kaine campaign's plans on everything from apprenticeships to the Zika virus, including: -Building an economy that works for everyone, not just those at the top.-Making the biggest investment in good-paying jobs since World War II, including infrastructure, manufacturing, clean energy, and small business.-Making debt-free college a reality and tackling the student debt crisis.-Defeating ISIS, strengthening our alliances, and keeping our military strong.-Breaking down the barriers that hold Americans back by reforming our broken immigration system, ending mass incarceration, protecting voting rights, and fixing our campaign finance system.-Putting families first through universal, affordable health care; paid family and medical leave, and affordable child care. Stronger Together offers specific solutions and a bold vision for building a more perfect union.

Rally at Florida International University in Miami, Florida, Saturday, July 23, 2016.

Make the boldest investment in good-paying jobs since World War II within the first 100 days.

Every American should be able to find a job that pays enough to support a family—a good job that provides dignity and a sense of pride.

We know that’s possible because we’ve done it before. After the upheaval of the Great Depression and World War II, our leaders came together to make investments that would help our country prosper for decades. We built highways to connect the entire country, and helped fund college education for returning veterans. We supported our scientists, researchers, and engineers as they opened up entire new fields of human endeavor in medicine, physics, and communications.

Now is the time to be bold and ambitious in building a twenty-first-century economy that benefits everyone, not just those at the top.

We’re going to start by proposing, in our first 100 days, the biggest investment in good-paying jobs since World War II. We’ll prioritize the kinds of investments in infrastructure, clean energy, small business, and manufacturing that will not only create jobs today, but will build opportunity for decades to come.

That’s why, together, we will:

• Invest in our infrastructure to build tomorrow’s economy today

• Support manufacturing by launching a plan to “Make It In America”

• Empower the job engine of America: our small businesses

• Make America the clean energy superpower of the twenty-first century

• Break down barriers for every American by investing in communities that have been left behind

• Invest in basic scientific research to open up new understanding and create new industries

Invest in our infrastructure to build tomorrow’s economy today.

To build a strong economy for the future, we need to start by building infrastructure today. Unfortunately, infrastructure spending has been on a long-term decline—and the consequences are all around us.

As a share of the economy, federal infrastructure investment is roughly half of what it was thirty-five years ago despite broad bipartisan support for infrastructure investment.¹³ Estimates of the size of our “infrastructure gap” register in the trillions of dollars.¹⁴ As a result of this shortfall, people can’t get to work, congestion keeps commuters stuck in traffic, and airports leave travelers stranded for hours or even days at a time. The impacts of climate change are already being felt across the country, as floods threaten our cities and historic droughts parch the West. Exactly how important it is that we fix our nation’s aging infrastructure was made painfully clear by the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, when an entire city was poisoned by incompetence, neglect, and old, outdated pipes. In California, one school district has had to resort to installing Wi-Fi on school buses because so many children lack access to the affordable, high-speed broadband they need to do their homework at home.

This is a national emergency—but it’s also a national opportunity. Every dollar of infrastructure investment leads to an estimated $1.60 increase in GDP the following year—and twice that over the subsequent twenty years.¹⁵ That’s because investing in infrastructure ultimately puts more money in workers’ pockets to spend at local restaurants, shops, and movie theaters. And every $1 billion in infrastructure spending creates 13,000 jobs, according to the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

As projects get completed, businesses realize savings as they ship goods. Better-designed transit systems connect more people to jobs and economic opportunities that were all but impossible to reach before. And new investments in twenty-first-century technology—like smarter, more resilient electric grids, safer and more sustainable water infrastructure, and high-speed broadband—help improve public health and safety, save families and cities money, and open up new economic opportunities.

That’s why in our first one hundred days we will deliver the most ambitious investment in our nation’s infrastructure since President Eisenhower built the Interstate Highway System. Our plan will include significant new public investment, as well as a new National Infrastructure Bank to leverage private capital from investors and pension funds. We want these investments to be built to last. That’s why we will prioritize resilient infrastructure built to withstand the projected impacts of climate change. And we will prioritize making investments that upgrade and expand multiple kinds of infrastructure at once. Broadband cable can be laid at the same time a water system or gas pipes are being upgraded, for instance. An improved airport can have an even greater economic impact if transit options are built to make it easier for travelers to get there. We need to align our project planning and investments to make these kinds of “multi-modal” projects more common.

When President Eisenhower asked Congress to fund a national highway system, he recognized that “more than any single action by the government since the end of the war, this one would change the face of America.” He was right. We will focus these additional resources on investments that will change the face of our country for the better and build a strong twenty-first-century economy.

We will focus on:

• Connecting every household to affordable broadband and leading the world in next-generation wireless technology. By 2020, we want every household in America to be able to access affordable, high-speed broadband. We need to put Wi-Fi in more schools, workplaces, libraries, hospitals, and other public spaces, so Americans can get online no matter where they are. And we’ll lead the world in deploying the next generation of wireless technologies that will make the “Internet of Things” possible.

• Building the transportation systems of tomorrow. Crumbling roads and “structurally deficient” bridges are some of the most urgent and obvious signs of our infrastructure needs, and we will repair them. But we also need to make smart investments in building more modern roads and bridges, and revitalize our airports and transit. We will fund research into high-tech, Internet-enabled transportation technologies, like a wide-ranging system of advanced energy fueling stations for the twenty-first-century fleet; a network of roadway sensors that will alert drivers to an accident or a dangerous icy patch a mile ahead; and vehicles that can sense and communicate with one another, saving lives and reducing traffic. We will also complete the NextGen national airspace system, which will improve communication and reduce delays across our air travel network.

Although transit ridership has grown dramatically across the country, investment has not kept pace with demand. Chronic underinvestment in transit disproportionately hurts low-income communities and communities of color, as a lack of transportation options can make it much harder for people to get to work and school. We will encourage cities to work with low-income communities to ensure new transit investments are being made in a way that increases access for those who need it most.

• Making America a clean energy superpower. Our electric grid is stuck in the past, and families and businesses are the ones who pay the price. We need to upgrade it with smart grid technologies that reduce energy costs and give consumers more energy options, like rooftop solar panels. Our goal is to have half a billion solar panels installed by the end of our first term. We need to accelerate our transition to a clean energy economy so we can get half our electricity from clean, zero-carbon sources within a decade, and start building the transmission lines and storage technologies that will make that possible.

• Eliminating “choke points” of commerce to save businesses and consumers money. Every year, our businesses have to spend an extra $27 billion in transportation costs just because of congestion in our freight networks.¹⁶ A cargo train can reach Chicago from the West Coast within two days, only to spend as much as thirty hours getting across Chicago itself.¹⁷ These delays are costly for farmers, manufacturers, small businesses, and consumers alike. We need to make major, coordinated investments to eliminate these “choke points” of commerce, saving money and making our entire economy more competitive.

• Revitalizing public schools in every zip code. We need safe, healthy, high-tech public schools in every zip code so all of our kids can get the education they deserve. It’s unacceptable that today kids in Detroit are sitting in classrooms that are infested with mold and rodents. Kids in Newark can’t drink the water because it contains dangerous levels of lead. And that’s nothing to say of all the schools where science labs are outdated or budget cuts have closed libraries. In fact, one survey found that 53 percent of public schools need extensive repair or replacement.¹⁸ We will finally make these much-needed renovations.

• Rebuilding our water systems to protect public health. Parts of our drinking water system are more than a century old, and the system as a whole leaks nearly 6 billion gallons of water a day—that’s roughly one-sixth of our national daily water use. Old, overburdened wastewater systems send more than 900 billion gallons of untreated sewage a year into our rivers and streams.¹⁹ And in the West, record droughts and raging wildfires are destroying land, depleting reservoirs, and straining budgets. To solve these problems, we will harness both public and private resources to revitalize our aging water infrastructure, expand innovative efforts to capture and reuse water, and increase federal investment in water conservation in the West. And we will establish the first-ever national Water Innovation Lab to pioneer advances in water technology, just as our existing national labs have done for energy.

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13. Elizabeth Mcnihol, “It’s Time for States to Invest in Infrastructure,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, February 2016, http://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/its-time-for-states-to-invest-in-infrastructure.

14. “Report Card for America’s Infrastructure,” American Society of Civil Engineers, March 2013, http://infrastructurereportcard.org/a/documents/2013-Report-Card.pdf.; and Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Move: Putting America’s Infrastructure Back in the Lead (2015).

15. Isabelle Cohen, Thomas Freiling, and Eric Robinson, “The Economic Impact and Financing of Infrastructure Spending,” College of William & Mary Thomas Jefferson Program in Public Policy Williamsburg, December 2011, https://www.wm.edu/as/publicpolicy/documents/prs/aed.pdf.

16. “An Economic Analysis of Transportation Infrastructure Investment,” The White House Council of Economic Advisers, July 2014, https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/economic_analysis_of_transportation_investments.pdf.

17. “About Create,” Chicago Region Environmental and Transportation Efficiency Program, http://www.createprogram.org/about.htm.

18. “Condition of America’s Public School Facilities: 2012–2013,” U.S. Department of Education, 2014, http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014022.pdf.

19. Ben Bovarnick, Shiva Polefka, and Arpita Bhattacharyya, “Rising Water, Rising Threat,” Center for American Progress, October 2014, https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/wastewater-report.pdf.

Revitalizing manufacturing by launching a plan to “Make It In America.”

Manufacturing matters. Manufacturing jobs pay well and provide workers with security, dignity, and a path to the middle class. The industry is not only the backbone of our economy but also improves ou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Growing Together: An Economy that Works for Everyone, Not Just Those at the Top
• 2. Safer Together: Secure American Leadership and Keep Us Safe
• 3. Standing Together: Building Bridges, Not Walls
• 4. Working Together: Breaking Through the Gridlock to Get Results
• About the Authors
• Copyright