John Edwards for President-Marathon for the Middle Class

Marathon for the Middle Class
36 Bold Ideas to Strengthen the Middle Class

On Tuesday, January 1st, John began a 36-hour "Marathon for the Middle Class" leading up to the Iowa caucuses on January 3, 2008.

The marathon across Iowa will give John a chance to talk to thousands of caucus goers about his plans to stand up to the powerful special interests and give hardworking middle class families a voice in Washington. Each hour, he will highlight one specific policy initiative - a total of 36 steps to strengthen the middle class.

Create More Good Jobs

1. Raise the Minimum Wage to $9.50: Our economy works best when regular families are sharing in its prosperity. Today, on the day when the Iowa minimum wage increase becomes law, Edwards renewed his call to raise the national minimum wage to $9.50 by 2012 and index it to grow over time, helping millions of low-wage workers earn a decent wage.

2. Act Now to Create Jobs: Typical workers have seen their wages stagnate for the past seven years, and now the job market may be weakening. Edwards believes that we should invest $25 billion now – and possibly $75 billion more in the next few months – to create jobs and promote economic growth. His plan will build clean energy infrastructure, expand unemployment insurance, avoid state budget cuts and tax increases, and end the housing crisis.

3. Support American Ingenuity: The most important factor for America's future prosperity is its investment in education, science, technology and innovation. Edwards will cut taxes for private-sector innovation, invest in research at the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, and restore America’s leadership in science and math education.

4. Strengthen Labor Laws: Union membership can be the difference between a poverty-wage job and middle-class security. Federal law promises workers the right to choose a union, but the law is poorly enforced, full of loopholes, and routinely violated by employers. Edwards will pass the Employee Free Choice Act to strengthen labor laws and guarantee workers a real choice over whether to form a union.

5. Ban the Permanent Replacement of Strikers: The right to strike is a necessary last resort for workers to force employers to bargain in good faith. To make sure workers can bargain fairly, Edwards will prohibit employers from permanently replacing striking workers.

6. Protect Prevailing Wages: Government contractors should not win contracts with low-ball bids that undercut wages. Edwards will protect the Davis Bacon Act to ensure that construction workers receive the local prevailing wage.

7. Cut Taxes for Working Families: To reward the efforts of low-income workers and help them move up into the middle class, Edwards will triple the Earned Income Tax Credit for adults without children and cut its marriage penalty that hits low-income families.

8. Strengthen the Safety Net for Workers Struggling to Find Jobs: Our nation's unemployment safety net is badly outdated and most workers – particularly part-time, low-wage, and temporary workers – are not protected during hard times. Edwards will modernize the program to cover 500,000 more workers a year.

Help Families Save and Get Ahead

9. Tackle the Housing Crisis: With millions of families at risk of losing their homes, stronger action is needed to help them and head off further economic damage. Edwards will create a Home Rescue Fund to help families facing foreclosure, require lenders to take new steps to prevent foreclosures, and let bankruptcy judges adjust the terms of mortgages on first homes.

10. Ban Predatory Mortgage Lending: Today's homeowners are more than three times more likely to lose their homes than they were a generation ago. Edwards will pass a strong national law to prohibit the worst abuses in the mortgage market such as steep prepayment penalties, mandatory arbitration clauses, balloon loans, loan flipping, and excessive fees.

11. Protect Families from Abusive Financial Products: There are five federal bank regulators who ensure bank profitability, but no watchdog that protects consumers from abusive or unfair credit terms. Edwards will create a new Family Savings and Credit Commission to put a new federal agency on the side of consumers.

12. Limit Abusive Credit Card Practices: Credit card abuses in recent years include retroactive rate increases, bait-and-switch marketing, and other unfair practices. Edwards will pass a Borrower's Security Act to ensure basic fairness in credit card terms.

13. Help Families Save: While the tax code favors wealth over work, regular families struggle to save and get ahead. Edwards will create a Get Ahead credit to match $500 in savings up to dollar-for-dollar, helping families get ready for homeownership, college expenses, or retirement.

Pass True Universal Health Care

14. Cover Every American: There are 47 million Americans without health insurance. Edwards will guarantee true universal coverage by creating new subsidies to make insurance affordable for every family, requiring employers to contribute to the cost of covering their workers, creating new Health Care Markets to offer affordable plans, and requiring by law that everyone is insured.

15. Bring Down Costs and Improve Care: Edwards will take common-sense steps to bring down health care costs and improve the quality of care. He will invest in primary care that improves health and brings down costs and create "medical homes" to coordinate the care of patients with multiple chronic diseases. He will require the adoption of electronic medical records, disseminate research on proven treatments, and move toward pay for performance.

16. Make Prescription Drugs More Affordable: To make prescription drugs more affordable, Edwards will allow the safe reimportation of drugs from Canada, limit direct-to-consumer marketing, let Medicare negotiate with drug companies, and study the use of prizes rather than patents to bring down the cost of breakthrough drugs.

17. Take on Insurance Companies: To ensure that insurance companies are really there for patients who need care, Edwards will pass new laws to prevent abuses, enforce existing insurance rules, and create more competition and choice in insurance markets. Americans will no longer be on their own against insurance companies.

Strengthen Our Schools

18. Create Universal Early Childhood Education: Quality preschool education should be as common as kindergarten. The Edwards Great Promise initiative will work with states to enroll every four-year-old in an early childhood education program.

19. Invest in Great Teachers: Nothing is more important in a school than the relationship between a teacher and a child. Edwards will raise pay for teachers in successful high-poverty schools, improve working conditions and increase time for teacher collaboration and planning, address barriers for teachers moving between states, help teachers with extra support in their early years and dedicate federal resources to reducing class sizes.

20. Create a National Teachers University: Because having great teachers is a national priority, Edwards will create a national teachers' university – a West Point for teachers – to recruit 1,000 top college students a year, train them to be excellent teachers, and encourage them to teach where they are needed most.

21. Radically Overhaul No Child Left Behind: Edwards believes that the law must be fundamentally changed to live up to its goal of helping all children learn at high levels. He will reject the use of standardized, primarily multiple choice reading and math tests, and its mandatory, cookie-cutter reforms. Instead, he will use broader measures of success and invest more in struggling schools.

22. Create College for Everyone: Edwards will make it possible for every student to work their way through college with a new College for Everyone initiative, modeled on a successful program he started in a rural North Carolina county. He will pay for public-college tuition, fees, and books for students who work part time and stay out of trouble.

Smart Trade Policy

23. Enact Smarter Trade Policies: We need to stop American jobs from being shipped overseas because of unfair trade deals. For too long our trade deals have focused on corporate profits, not regular families' jobs and incomes. Edwards will make sure any new trade agreements benefit regular families and include strong and enforceable labor and environmental standards and will hold our trading partners, like China, accountable.

24. Eliminate Tax Incentives to Move Offshore: Multinational corporations can greatly reduce their tax bill – or even eliminate it entirely – by investing overseas rather than here at home. Edwards will reform the tax code to remove these incentives to invest offshore.

25. Help Dislocated Workers: The economic upheaval of globalization is no longer limited to certain jobs or communities. Edwards expand aid for dislocated workers and their communities, starting earlier to diversify local economies and create a new Training Works program tied to actual jobs.

Help Working Families

26. Provide Paid Leave to All Workers by 2014: The United States is one of only a handful of countries in the world that guarantees no form of paid family leave, even maternity leave. Edwards will work with states to offer paid family and medical leave to all workers by 2014.

27. Make Child Care Affordable: Child care is a huge expense for the majority of families with children under five. Edwards will help parents pay for child care by more than doubling the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit to pay up to 50 percent of childcare expenses up to $5,000.

28. Make Child Care Higher Quality: Most of the country's child care is rated between poor and mediocre. Edwards will help other states duplicate North Carolina's innovative Smart Start program, which invests in improving child care quality and other steps to promote healthy development of young children.

29. Improve Food Safety: Recent safety scares with imported food have underlined the need for stronger safety measures. Edwards will end the delays and start enforcing mandatory country-of-origin labeling to inform families, increase inspections of imported food, and give federal regulators the power to demand that unsafe food is removed from shelves immediately.

30. Ensure the Safety of Children's Toys: Edwards will put new leadership and more resources at the Consumer Product Safety Commission, ban lead in children's products, require independent testing for safety, and stop risky products at the border.

Invest in Rural Areas

31. Create the New Energy Economy in Rural America: Edwards will establish the New Energy Economy Fund to jumpstart renewable sources of energy including ethanol, biodiesel, wind, and solar. He will require all new cars and 25 percent of gas stations to be compatible with E85 ethanol as well as gasoline. These energies can make the U.S. independent of foreign oil, cut global warming pollution, and create new industries and jobs in rural America.

32. Ensure Fairness for Family Farmers: The rules are stacked against family farmers. Edwards supports the strict enforcement of laws against anticompetitive mergers, unfair pricing, and country-of-origin laws. To help family farmers he will also limit farm subsidies to $250,000 per person, close loopholes in payment limits, and expand conservation programs.

33. Fairness in Packer Ownership: Edwards will enact a strong national ban on packer ownership to stop the spread of large corporate hog interests and create a national moratorium on the construction and expansion of hog farm lagoons.

34. Invest Seed Money for Rural Recovery: Helping Main Street small businesses is a promising approach to economic development. Edwards will create the Rural Economic Advancement Challenge (REACH) Fund to bring capital and management expertise to small town America.

Achieve Energy Independence

35. Halt Global Warming and Create the New Energy Economy: Edwards will cap the emission of global warming pollution, reducing it year-by-year and auctioning off the right to emit any greenhouse gases. He will invest $13 billion a year in renewable energy and energy efficiency technology, creating more than 1 million new jobs.

36. Create Green Collar Jobs: To ensure we have a trained workforce in new energy technology and to share the economic opportunities widely, Edwards will launch a "Green Collar Jobs" initiative to train and employ at least 150,000 workers a year in new energy economy jobs, like weatherizing homes and operating local biorefineries.