Fair Start Movement

Category: Political Equality

  • Want to Hold Rich White Men Accountable to the Law? Let’s Start with Elon Musk.

    Want to Hold Rich White Men Accountable to the Law? Let’s Start with Elon Musk.

    Police brutalizing people of color and the poor is nothing new, but the issue is finally getting the attention it deserves.

    Meanwhile rich white men like Elon Musk, who’s looted billions in profits during the pandemic, can ignore COVID-19 shutdown orders and reopen a car factory rife with racism, and nothing happens. People like Musk and Donald Trump – born rich – are playing with their space toys, launching a mission that does little good for most people, and seems like some version of the movie Elysium, while black men are being killed down here on Earth.

    • In the United States, one set of laws exists for the rich and another one applies to the poor. This system is illegitimate.
    • This double system will persist as long as an extreme imbalance of wealth and power remains. Violence is one form of power, money is another, and the solution has to deal with both. We need to focus on a fundamental fix to the massive imbalance right now, and the one with the greatest impact – by far – for the most numerous and vulnerable classes.
    • Because a child’s right to a fair start in life is the fundamental human right that overrides all other interests including property rights, we can use that right to redistribute resources, end the inequity, and build the real constitutional democracies we all deserve.

    Take Action to Hold Musk Accountable

    Contact the California governor here, explain why Musk committed a crime when he reopened the California Tesla plant, and demand action. Let’s see how legitimate our system really is.

    Find and engage Musk in person, lawfully and peacefully, and demand that the resources he’s using to colonize space, worsen inequity, and turn his own six children into billionaires be used instead to fund Fair Start family planning and the constituting of real democracies. Musk, whose wealth originated from a system of colonization and exploitation in Africa and who very likely has a net negative impact on the environment, has publicly mocked the Occupy movement. He has also consistently promoted family planning systems designed to create massive economies filled with workers and consumers that serve the rich, rather than human rights based systems that empower people. Instead of speaking out, Musk is deliberatly using SpaceX to distract people away from an issue of justice, to focus instead on his newest display of wealth.

    Finally, we can move from a regressive legal system based on violence at its worst, and incentives as a lesser evil, to one based on true self-determination, starting with the birth of every child. Urge our leadership to adopt Fair Start family planning as the fundamental basis for our laws and policies.

  • Elon Musk Is Threatening Our Democracy. What Do We Do?

    Elon Musk Is Threatening Our Democracy. What Do We Do?

    Elon Musk puts the wealth of elites over democracy. We see that this week as he flagrantly defies Covid 19 lock down orders for one of his factories, putting an entire community as risk. Does he, and people like him, wield too much power? Is there a solution to the threat their power poses to others?

    Consider these the facts about Musk: 

    • Musk has claimed that his wealth is self-made, but he was born a relatively wealthy white child in South Africa during apartheid. His family owned an emrald mine in Zambia. He left South Africa amid the turmoil, while others stayed to reform the system.
    • As of May 2020, he has a net worth of $36.5 billion and is listed by Forbes as the 31st-richest person in the world. By contrast, the median American household worth is roughly $97,300. Musk has used this wealth to create a level of influence over industry, media, and politics that dwarfs average Americans’ influence over public affairs and their futures and that drowns out their voices.
    • Musk is part of the top of a power dynamic in which the world’s richest people own the same wealth and influence as as roughly the poorest half of humanity.
    • Musk is seen by some as an environmentalist, but he has consistently stoked fears of underpopulation and has promoted population growth policies that would exacerbate the climate crisis and many other environmental crises more than almost anything else we could do. In addition to the impact of his various industries, his commercial space ventures are a massive and growing source of light pollution that obscure one’s view of space and interfere with the practice of astronomy. 
    • As discussed above Musk, in a growing display of antisocial behavior, consistently violated the law, and risked lives, to maintain production and profits at one of his factories in California. The state appears to be acquiescing to the violation. He is being treated as if he is above the law because of his wealth and influence.

    These Facts Raise Questions

    Why is Musk above the law? Is he a fundamental threat to our democracy — and to our right to be self-determining people rather than people whose lives are determined by a small group of people? It’s undemocratic that some individuals, usually born wealthy, wield such disproportionate influence over our lives. If Musk is a threat, and if elected officials do nothing, are free people obligated to act to protect what so many have died for?  

    The problem we face is in knowing what to do, but that problem comes with a solution. We resist taking action against individuals like Musk because rather than using violence, he uses money to wield massive power over others. But as the climate crisis has shown, more subtle human power and influence, like social positioning and climate emissions can pose the greatest threat of all. Money is no exception. As Musk’s defiance of the order shows, money can easily threaten lives. 

    So What’s the Solution?

    The answer lies in Musk’s promotion of population growth, which is consistent with his response to the pandemic. Both evidence his disdain for human rights and democracy, and make him a unique target for those who want to promote human freedom.

    Musk’s statements show that he mistakenly equates democracies with economies in which future children are labor, consumer, and taxpayer inputs and in which the nonhuman world is a resource. That is incorrect. Democracies precede economies and are defined by strict human-rights parameters that make them function, such as the right to speak freely (and have an equal voice). Those rights give us a baseline for what’s an entitlement, cost and benefit, rather than the random “good fortune” Musk had of being born a wealthy white man in South Africa. He has actually invoked the concept of freedom, that countless people died to protect, in order to risk innocent lives as a means of extending his undemocratic control of others. That deserves a response, and his position on family planning gives a pathway for it.

    Musk is pushing for population growth and family planning policies that would try to replace democracies with economies that are devoid of human rights and would ensure that those with wealth control others. He is pushing for kids to be born irrespective of the number born, their levels of welfare and education, and their positioning relative to rich kids, He’s pushing for growth irrespective of its impact on our natural ecologies. In other words, he promotes the family planning model that created the climate crisis. He is pushing for a massive populace designed for economies and not democracies, and world where markets seem like the natural and inevitable state of affairs, and one that ensures the positioning of people like him. 

    And it’s the first, or lexically prior, human right – the right to a Fair Start in life – Musk may be trying to avoid when he ignores human rights and promotes the chaos of anarchic markets over the freedom of democracy. The right to have children, the right that puts the “human” in human rights, best orients from the perspective of the future child and their right to fair starts in life. That right is the engine that keeps democracies going, and it overrides competing interests, like Musk’s interest in dominating others and the skies, as well as his his passing that dominance onto his progeny. What he thinks is wealth he created is the product of a much larger and more complex social ecology that he is ignoring. And the fundamental right to a fair start in life, which represents the first peremptory norm and the constant reconstituting of our social ecology and democracy, overrides his claims to disproportional wealth, enabling free people to target Musk and other threats like him with a specific demand that would actually level the economic playing field. And it’s not about choosing government over people. That right also overrides the interests of big government and their bureaucracies, especially when the government (who these days is largely comprised of the uber-wealthy themselves) disregard the rule of law and let the wealthy take over.

    People like Musk exist because we have yet to take the overriding right to a fair start in life seriously and have instead pretended it was the hand of God that determined who won the birth lottery. Perhaps, given that right’s efficacy in addressing the crises we face, we should take it seriously now. 

    This Isn’t Socialism or Capitalism; It Isn’t Economics at All

    No economies exist without laws, and no laws exist without a people capable of making them – imagine something like a town hall setting. Both the left and the right value protecting children’s future and their right to equal opportunities in life. But to get there requires limiting the total quantum of human power exerted upon our surroundings and decentralizing it intergenerationally — or finally realizing the duality of freedom from others and the freedom to equal opportunities in life.

    Both Big Business and Big Government, at the top of a Ponzi Scheme pyramid, are pushing women to have more and more kids as a means of creating future labor, and needy consumers, instead. Thy are making economies before democracy. Reasonable people on both the left and the right can work together to target key figures at the top of that pyramid to – instead – to build free democracies through better family planning. Together, we can secure that true form of freedom over its imitation: the anarchical and infantile “I get to do whatever I want to do” sort of freedom that has never made sense, that ends up hurting people and compromising their own freedom, and the form that is promoted by people like Musk who want to change town halls into shopping malls and to replace political freedom into employment and consumption.

    Look for the wizard behind the curtain in the case of Musk. You will see the appropriation and rebranding of other persons’ work by one individual, using wealth enabled by a system of laws he now flouts. The disparity of wealth and influence he enjoys is the product of mistakes in our system, not something naturally occurring.

    Musk appears publicly. Engage him, as you would in a town hall, personally, peacefully, and legally, and demand that he fund Fair Start family planning. Do what our government should be doing to make us free, and use Musk as an example.

    We have a right to a Fair Start share of his resources, and his violating the law presents an opportunity to truly build democracy, taking down the powerful who control us in the spirit of liberation. And while you are at it, urge the United Nations to speed along that liberation, take human rights seriously, and recognize Fair Start as a fundamental human right.

    Those most able must do what’s most effective to maintain a just system.

  • Does Freedom Require Intergenerational Secession?

    Does Freedom Require Intergenerational Secession?

    Beneath many of the headlines today there lurks a tension few see: Communities of people fighting for autonomy from the massive nations, and multinational corporations, that work together to control them.

    Our default tendency is to see these struggles in three dimensions – as groups of people struggling against one another. That would not be accurate. All groups of people are in constant demographic change, with new members being born and old members dying. The struggle is in this sense four-dimensional, though its hard for our human brains to perceive this. This seemingly mundane fact could hold the key to opening a new front, or more accurately limitless fronts, in the struggle for human rights and democracy, and the creation of truly free communities where everyone has an effective voice.

    How so?

    Four-dimensional freedom

    The climate crisis had laid bare serious mistakes in the way the world has connected the concepts of family planning and human rights. The modeling was deeply flawed. The mistakes enabled nations and multinational corporations to rise to their hegemony by treating future generations as economic inputs, and exploiting the explosion of a world population who necessarily sees itself as confined to economies, rather than democracies where they play an effective role in their own governance.

    If we correct for those mistakes we arrive at a surprising, but apparently unavoidable, conclusion. There is no conception of human freedom – including equal opportunities in life, a voice in one’s democracy, and the liberty and safety of nature – without intergenerational secession. We have to free future generations from the hegemony of, and unlimited control by, the generations that are alive today.

    And as such, truly human rights-based family planning models give us something new: Shared values, conceptions and language for an emancipated future – a new normative vocabulary that cuts across fundamental political ideologies like liberalism and communitarianism, joining the two. Under this new modeling we can begin to “constitute” communities of free and equal people in ways we never have before.  These new models also have the quality of lexical priority, because we are before we do, and as such they override the property claims and tax obligations that prop up the massive nations and their multinational corporate allies. We have the necessarily antecedent and superior right, and obligation, to constitute free communities before turning to any of the rights and obligations that functioning economic systems require.

    In other words, seeing freedom as four-dimensional and reforming family planning systems and policies accordingly, give us new and deeply compelling reasons for people of all political ideologies to target top-of-the-pyramid national and multinational corporate leaders in to order to decentralized their power – in a new four-dimensional pathway – into future generations. These compelling reasons include finally making sense of social contract theory in a way that appeals to a broad swath of values and thereby justifies governance, and the incomparable impact doing so would have on improving child welfare, reducing inequity, building democracy, and mitigating the climate and other ecological crises.

    This new process and understanding of freedom redraws the battle lines as between pre-constitutional, subjectivist, and economically-minded systems and their supporters (or “precons,”), and democratically constituted systems comprised of free people.  The demand at the front becomes simple but forceful: A cooperatively arrived at fair start in life for every child defined by five objective and irrefutable values.

    Next steps

    The first step to opening the endless fronts of an intergenerational secession starts with a simple statement by the Secretary General of the United Nations acknowledging the mistakes the UN made, and moving towards better modeling. TAKE ACTION: Urge him to open the fronts.

  • Worried About Democracy? Trump is Merely A Symptom.

    Worried About Democracy? Trump is Merely A Symptom.

    Democracy is eroding. The cause? It’s not what you think.

    Minorities are having their voting rights strangled. Gerrymandering is subverting legitimate representation, as is the interference of foreign adversaries who are manipulating voters. Democracy is crumbling beneath our feet. 

    Believe it or not, the greatest threat to democracy isn’t Trump, or even Vladimir Putin. They are only symptoms of a greater problem.

    The greatest threat to democracy is inequality.

    A major report earlier this year described as such, including the fact that the U.S. (#1) and U.K (#2) have the highest level of inequality in the developed world. Forbes now reports that the “humongous wealth gap” is only getting worse. Furthermore, a 2014 study which concluded that the U.S. is more of an oligarchy than a democracy. It should come as no surprise that moneyed interests control Washington.

    But what does that have to do with democracy? The wealthiest citizens enjoy far greater influence on policy, government and our daily lives than the rest of us. The Koch brothers are the most obvious example. We typically don’t recognize the extent to which it affects our families though.

    And that’s where inequality undercuts democracy – our voice as “the people”, as those with extreme wealth steer policy in their favor. Ask yourself, why is income from hard earned labor is taxed at a higher rate than income from stocks and investments? Who is responsible for that? You can bet that it’s not the majority of Americans.

    “In country after country, the influence of rich elites over policymaking is skewing economies in favour of those at the top, at the expense of economic progress for all,” explains the UN Association – UK. 

    The theory is not new. Former US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously weighed in.

    “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have extreme wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can’t have both.”

    The Guardian also argued that the higher the inequality, the more likely we are to move away from democracy.

    The most effective way to address inequality:

    What is the most effective way to address the inequality that is eroding our democracies? Better family planning. 

    Yes, helping parents wait and plan is the proven most effective way to break the cycle of generational inequality and poverty – which is now at a staggering 40%. And it’s not just about being effective, or outcomes. A fair start in life is the first and overriding human right. It takes precedence over anything with which it conflicts, including the wealth that people at the top are using to destroy democracy. Parents and communities have a right to those resources to give kids a fair start. 

    Let’s start the Second American Revolution, the one where we come together as free and equal people with future generations, in our nation’s capital. The idea is simple: The District can reach many of its goals at once by promoting smaller families so that communities and families can invest more in each child. It is centered around every child’s right to a fair start in life, and is designed to address the greatest threats facing the District and nation, including inequality and climate change.

    Take Action:

    Help kids get a fair start. Support our effort for Guaranteed Minimum Income for kids in D.C. by tweeting @MayorBowser. Read more here.

  • Tell Ivanka to Stop Throwing Women Under the Bus

    Tell Ivanka to Stop Throwing Women Under the Bus

    Ivanka Trump and her three kids were all born wealthy, with privileges in life they did not earn, and a massive head start over people who will never be able to catch up. She and her kids enjoy such advantage in part, because of the tax, family planning and economic policies that enable the rich to become richer while the middle class shrinks.

    Meanwhile, Ivanka and her husband personally lobbied to reducing access to abortion. More importantly, as the President’s Senior Advisor, she had a hand in the sweeping and harmful Title X changes. The changes implemented in February shifted federal funding from organizations that provide birth control, STD screenings and preventative health exams to faith-based and pregnancy crisis centers and abstinence only education.

    family planning
    Results of access to long-acting reversible contraceptive in Colorado. Photo: LARC4CO

    The ability to control the timing and number of children is one of the most critical factors in determining a woman’s empowerment, independence and success. Research indicates that women who delay motherhood and have smaller families are significantly better off economically than their peers who started families at the average age. Smaller families tend to result in a more equal distribution of parental responsibility. Women who have fewer children also tend to have greater decision making power in the household, and are less likely to be drowned out by a spouse or relatives.

    Ivanka is instead advancing policies that ensure a steady stream of poor future laborers, consumers, and taxpayers. Need proof? While she purports to be a champion of women, she recently expressed opposition to a minimum wage increase, stating:

    “I’ve spent a lot of time traveling around this country over the last four years. People want to work for what they get, so I think this idea of a guaranteed minimum is not something most people want.”

    That increase would raise their standard of living and ability for mothers to give kids a fair start. People like her – who live on investments rather than hard work, rely on a future underclass of workers to support her and her family. They feed off the growth that poor family planning creates.

    Infographic with two women: one 15–19 years old, one 20–24. Between 2009–2017, birth and abortion rates dropped 59%/60% for teens, and 35%/41% for young women; 51,427 women benefitted since 2008.
    Photo: LARC4CO

    But there are efforts to counter these regressive policies. Having Kids is part of a coalition of groups in Colorado, LARC4CO, that are pushing for affordable access to effective contraception and other reproductive health services for all women. We just re-upped. Read two key fact sheets about the coalition’s work here and here.

    TAKE ACTION: Tell Ivanka to act like the champion for women she claimed to be and advocate for universal access to family planning services to empower women and give every child a fair start in life. Tweet her at @IvankaTrump.

  • Brett Kavanaugh: Let’s Take A Deeper Dive

    Brett Kavanaugh: Let’s Take A Deeper Dive

    For a lot of people, the connection between Brett Kavanaugh’s ascent to the Supreme Court and family planning is fairly simple: He is a threat to Roe v. Wade, and women’s right to terminate their pregnancies. Others will go further and consider that – given how tainted he is – anything the Court does with abortion will only embolden and further the women’s movement. Both of these arguments are missing something about the Kavanaugh debacle that matters more, for everyone.

    Our transfixing on this story is an example of how power over many is centralized in just a few people, and how they can influence our lives in many ways, both obvious and subtle. 

    Yes, Kavanaugh’s confirmation is an immediate threat to women. It is also a larger reminder of the way the patriarchy dominates all of us – a reminder worth hearing. Just look at Paul Ryan, who pushes women to have more kids in order to fuel the economy. Trump’s championing Kavanaugh is an obvious example of raw power over those who are vulnerable. But so are his family tax reforms, which are designed to encourage a patriarchal family planning model grounded on the values of economic growth and Handmaid’s Tale style national strength at a cost to child welfare, equality, and nature. What’s the difference? Progressives are outraged by Kavanaugh. Yet, they barely noticed Trump’s more subtle family planning moves, ones that will echo his values long into the future.

    While the world was transfixed on the spectacle of a few people in Washington D.C., the world around us continued to change because of the actions and inactions of those in power. The environment became increasingly polluted, and the planet’s average temperature continued to rise. Each minute of the day roughly 250 babies were born into the world (not enough for many special economic interests that wanted more consumers, future laborers, and taxpayers), many in conditions that would lead to their early and unpleasant deaths, or if they survive, to the further destabilization of their communities and regions. Children were born around the world to both the rich and the poor, and that process alone furthered the gap between the two – significantly. Families bore children in whom they would instill the hierarchical sexism we see in Washington D.C. – ensuring its continuity long into the future. 

    Why is it so hard to even think in these terms? The average human alive today is hardwired to think and problem solve in terms of simple and immediate stories, rather than more abstractly. That’s not a good thing. Family planning is the greatest determinant of the quality of life on earth, and the quantity and social quality (through our early childhood development and its knock-on effects) of the people that will inhabit it. While we stared at the sensation of the testimony (much the way Al Gore noted we distractedly gape at the puppetry of Trump), the world was busily and quickly unfolding around us – and not all in ways that are good.

    What’s the solution? We can break the temporal myopia and other cognitive dissonances by thinking of family planning policies in different ways than we do today. There are more matriarchal models that are based on an ethic of care, cooperation, and the restoration of nature. Rather than focus simply on what economic interests want, we can instead begin to focus on what future children need. First things should come first. That change will help us empower future generations, and begin to build real and decentralized democracies comprised of capable and thoughtful people engaged in true self-rule, new communities that are free from the handful of overly-influential people in Washington, D.C. and their centralization of power and control.

    The public figures in Washington D.C., or Hollywood, or in boardrooms or on sports teams across the country, are like the shadows on the wall in the Allegory of the Cave. Learning to ignore and disempower them, to take back their resources and influence in order to empower future generations as the self-rulers of the future, and be mindful of the true world around us and our potential role in it, is our way out of that cave. The Brett Kavanaugh debacle goes well beyond Roe. It is a reminder of how dangerously limited our species is, and how we need to refocus our attention on changing the way we plan families if we want a better future.

  • Tell Unilever: Promote Civility Not Censorship

    Tell Unilever: Promote Civility Not Censorship

    Unilever, a corporation with a roughly $9 billion dollar annual marketing budget, is threatening to pull its advertising from platforms like Google and Facebook if they don’t censor and remove more of the content posted by users.

    We appreciate the move to exercise corporate citizenship by forcing accountability on platforms like Facebook and Youtube. Cracking down on fake news is good. But is Unilever’s standard too broad? What is considered acceptable content? They have massive spending power to influence the content that we and our kids see.

    The company claims it wants to protect children. Are we protecting children and creating a stronger democracy by allowing corporations have a larger voice, as citizens have a smaller voice?

    If Unilever wants civility on digital platforms, it should consider the impact of family planning on our becoming, over time, a developed and civil society. Rather than encouraging parents to ignore their concerns and just have kids, it should encourage smaller and more sustainable families that cooperate to plan a fair start for every child. Instead of promoting censorship after-the-fact, Unilever should promote sustainable families that thoughtfully develop children for a civil, rather than consumerist, society.

    Tweet Unilever CEO Paul Polman at @PaulPolman and politely suggest the following:
    We want civility without the requirement for censorship. Use your influence to promote better family planning and thoughtful citizens, not an infinite supply of silenced consumers.

  • Protect Your Future from Ivanka Trump and Marco Rubio

    Protect Your Future from Ivanka Trump and Marco Rubio

    Marco Rubio and Ivanka Trump want taxpayers to pay women to have more kids because it will mean more consumers and demand for big business, cheaper labor in the future as workers compete for jobs, and more taxpayers.

    We need better family planning, not a cash-for-babies scheme.

    • Their proposal ignores child welfare. How does encouraging people to have more children ensure that each child will be born in optimal conditions?
    • Their proposal ignores every child’s right to a fair start in life. Don’t all kids deserve the healthcare, education, and nutrition Trump and Rubio’s kids are getting? Don’t you and your kids deserve help getting to that fair start in life? 
    • Their proposal is straight climate change denial. It would further destroy the polluted and collapsing natural environment our kids are inheriting. Why are Trump and Rubio ignoring the clear evidence that larger families have the worst impact on our climate, oceans, other species, etc? Why are they ignoring the way massive overcrowding is destroying our quality of life?

    Instead of Trump and Rubio’s plan to overcrowd America, we want a Fair Start proposal that encourages better family planning: Parents waiting until they are ready to be great parents, having fewer children and investing more in each child, and getting the resources they need to to give every child a fair start in life through a fair division of this country’s wealth.

    Take Action Now

    Contact your Representative and ask them for this simple and better plan: We want tax reform that incentivizes better family planning aimed at giving every child their right to a fair start in life through smaller and more equitable families, not a scheme to create more consumers, workers, and taxpayers for Rubio, Trump, and their corporate sponsors.

  • Trump’s Tax Scam: Here’s a Better Idea

    Trump’s Tax Scam: Here’s a Better Idea

    Most people, even those deeply opposed to President Trump, probably think his plan to expand the child tax credit is a good thing. However, this proposal – long pushed by the religious right – is not so simple. Instead, it has to be viewed within the wider context, including the fact that Republicans are blocking access to family planning and playing politics with children’s health by delaying funding for the Child Health Insurance Program for some nine million needy kids.

    The idea of expanding the child tax credit – the $1000 the government cuts off your taxes for every kid you have – is not new. Increasing that credit been called for by many, perhaps most notoriously Ivanka Trump and Marco Rubio, as another cash incentive meant to encourage certain Americans to have more kids. The credit tries nudge people to reverse a progressive fertility decline in some populations. This decline has been perhaps the greatest success of the last half-century’s concerted efforts around the world for sustainable development, women’s empowerment, and environmental protection.  

    Beyond attempting to undermine women’s empowerment, environmental protection, and sustainable development, this new tax proposal has many other significant problems.

    Even with an increased tax credit, more kids inherently means less investment in each child. The average cost per child is about $230,000, which is in no way countered by an increase in the tax credit. Incentivizing larger families also leads to even greater inequality between rich and poor in a society where some families already buy six-dollar loaves of bread while others can’t afford diapers. Our society’s current approach to family planning continues to widen the gap, and incentivizing more kids will broaden the chasm between the haves and the have-nots. 

    Pushing families to have more kids is also the worst way to exacerbate climate change. Increasing the tax credit to encourage larger families should really be seen as an extreme form of climate change denial. Of course, this hurts an untold number of children in the long run.

    But the tax-credit is also a perfect example of how all of us – Republicans and Democrats alike – claim we care about children but fail to actually help them. Through the child-tax credit, our government is equating a “child” with a few extra dollars for the parent. This divorces the decision to have a baby from the real needs of that helpless and defenseless individual, and all the many physical and emotional resources each child deserves to have. None of those needs can be addressed by simply tossing parents a few more dollars.

    If we really cared about children, we wouldn’t propose minor tax credits in order to disguise massive giveaways to the rich and corporations. We wouldn’t, in a country where half of pregnancies are unplanned, be denying women access to family planning both domestically and abroad, or denying health insurance to our most at-risk children.

    This is what Trump’s tax and budget proposals add up to: Women being prodded to produce more children while society provides fewer resources and programs to care for those children. This creates a pool of resentful future workers with lower education and fewer opportunities – a permanent underclass whose only purpose is to prop up a system built on maximizing profits for the wealthy.

    We need a way to actually help kids, one that recognizes the vital importance of early childhood conditions. Preparation, planning, foresight, and collaboration are how we can truly care about the next child born.  

    We know how this would look: Smaller families making up integrated, cooperative communities that properly fund and support the vital array of resources – healthcare, education, environmental – every child needs to get a fair start in life.

    We could do so much better. If we look at our nation’s founding documents, we all have a fundamental birthright to equal opportunities in life. Instead of tax credits, we need incentives for parents and communities to work together to plan a fair start in life for every child.

    It’s time for a fundamental change in how we care for children. It’s time for Congress to be proactive, not reactive, and help every child have a fair start.

    Please contact your representatives and senators. Please politely tell them to develop a plan that incentivizes parents and communities to work together to plan a fair start in life for every child. 

    Thank you!