A Modern Georgist Democratic Platform
A modern Georgist Democratic platform, based on the 1890 platform, would involve health care, debt forgiveness, unearned income taxation, eliminating tariffs, and public utilities.
June 23, 2019
Rick DiMare
Attorney

Below is an example of what a modern Georgist Democratic Platform would look like, based on an updated version of Henry George's September 1890 Platform of the Single Tax League of the United States.

A full version of the original 1890 Platform is available here.

There are probably other Platform items, but I think these are the big ones:

(1) Universal single-payer health care (where Congress is the single-payer), but funded by paper and electronic U.S. Notes, not Federal Reserve notes (FRNs).

(2) Forgiveness of private debts, and conversion of the national debt into the national wealth by replacing most FRNs with U.S. Notes, basing this conversion on Congress's bankruptcy powers, and on the unconstitutionality of making the 1934-series-to-date FRN legal tender. Any remaining FRNs which may be needed by the banking system to lend out deposits must always be redeemable for Congress’s lawful money (legal tender U.S. Notes and coins), and must not be “legal tender in the payment of debts and taxes,” but only voluntarily “receivable in the payment of debts and taxes.”  In short, only U.S. Notes and coins are to be legal tender. Nothing else.

(3) All taxes needed to regulate the monetary system are to fall on unearned income and large estates, not on wages, with the understanding that a corporation's net income/profits (along with the dividends paid out from those profits) are also unearned income.

(4) Elimination of all tariffs, including those levied against the United States, but with heavy taxes falling on net corporate profits and dividends derived from the hiring of cheap labor, no matter where on earth that cheap labor is found. Such tax receipts are to be proportionally shared among four levels of government: local, state or county, national, and international. The rationale being that when unearned income is sufficiently shared (and properly recognized as including corporate profits and dividends) with local foreign governments, protectionist tariff policies against the United States become unnecessary.

(5) Government take-over (i.e., direct management) of all utilities, transportation and communication networks, energy companies, mining operations, and other "natural monopolies," with the understanding that a “natural monopoly” is determined by the use of scientific criteria to assure that government does not unnecessarily impose itself on legitimate free market industries, but only on industries where free market competition is not possible.

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Rick DiMare
Attorney

Rick is a self employed attorney from Boston, Massachusetts. He graduated from Boston College and studied law at the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover. He also administers the Facebook group called Common Wealth Tax, which seeks to explore the (currently obscure) link between modern income tax laws and the Land Value Tax (LVT) advocated by political economist and “Greenbacker” Henry George (1839-1897).