Platform - Green Party US Section III. Ecological Sustainability A. Climate Change Economic Bill of Rights Financing the Green New DealThe Green Party's 2020 presidential campaign produced a Budget for an Ecosocialist Green New Deal that estimated sector by sector its cost of implementation over ten years, as well as the number of jobs it would create.
- The Green Economy Reconstruction Program to reach 100% clean energy and zero emissions is estimated to be a 10-year, $27.5 trillion program. It would create 30,484,000 jobs, including 8,564,000 jobs in manufacturing.
- The Economic Bill of Rights is estimated to cost $1.42 trillion a year. It would create another 7,586,000 jobs, including 304,000 manufacturing jobs.
- The total for the Ecosocialist Green New Deal came to $42 trillion over ten years. Total jobs created is 38,070,000, including 8,868,000 manufacturing jobs.
The Ecosocialist Green New Deal proposes to pay for its program from a variety of short-term and long-term sources, including:
- Progressive Tax Reform — Close tax havens and implement (more) progressive taxes on wealth, estates, personal income, corporate income, and financial transactions.
- Ecological Taxes — The point of ecological taxes is not to raise revenues but reduce pollution and resource destruction.
If they are successful, they eliminate the source of their revenue.
As such, they should not be considered long-term revenue sources but can be useful for shorter-term financing of environmental goals.
- Ecological taxes are scarcity rents on the use of natural resources, such as the atmosphere, land, fossil fuels, and mineral resources.
While ecological taxes are not a substitute for social ownership and economic planning in a green energy transition, they can be part of economic planning to disincentivize fossil fuel use and natural resource extraction, dumping, and depletion.
Three ecological taxes should be instituted to support the Ecosocialist Green New Deal.
- A carbon tax will disincentivize fossil fuel use and do so internationally because carbon taxes function as a tariff on high-carbon imports, encouraging firms and nations that want to export products to the US to lower their carbon content.
- Land value taxation enables the whole community to benefit from the land values of a limited resource instead of a landowning class. Its revenues could be dedicated to funding affordable homes, farms, and business locations.
- Federal severance taxes on non-renewable resources, including reform of the 1872 Mining Law that now enables corporations to purchase mineral rights on public lands for a mere $5 an acre and pay no severance tax for minerals taken.
Peace Conversion — Deep cuts in the US military budget on the order of 50% to 75% and reallocating the savings into the Ecosocialist Green New Deal.
Public Money — Greens favor Monetary Reform based on the creation of debt-free public money by a Monetary Authority in the Treasury Department and spending that money into the economy through the federal budget, including the budget for the Ecosocialist Green New Deal.
Borrowing — Progressive and ecological taxes and reallocating military spending to the Ecosocialist Green New Deal may not generate enough revenue to make the massive investments immediately needed to rapidly transform the economy to clean energy. Climate breakdown will cost much more than not making those investments.
So pending Green Monetary Reform, the federal government may have to borrow to make the needed investments.
In such borrowing, Greens favor a program of Green Quantitative Easing where the Federal Reserve creates the money to buy the Treasury securities issued to support the Green New Deal investments.
This quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve would be used to bail out the planet and the people instead of the big banks as happened in the wake of the Great Recession.
Public Banks — Greens favor the creation of public banks at the local, state, and federal levels to help finance and target Green New Deal and other socially beneficial investments.
Sales of Public Goods and Services — The Ecosocialist Green New Deal will be producing and selling public goods and services through the public sector and receiving income for them, including power bill payments, transit fees, housing rents, and green machinery leases.
Over time, these revenues should cover the costs of the initial borrowing like any successful business investment.