We at Research & Degrowth are repeatedly being told that our framing won't work. That we are preaching to the choir by the way we frame our proposals, and that we will never convince the broader public. So, here are our policy proposals re-framed in the language of the U.S. elections.
Abolish all income tax on incomes lower than $50,000 dollars per year. Finance this tax break by establishing a sovereign carbon fund financed by charges to the oil, coal and natural gas industry and by a carbon fee on trade imports.
Make Friday a day off that we can dedicate to our families, friends and communities. Do not reduce salaries: same pay for four days of work. President Roosevelt did it during the Great Depression. This alone can create 10 million new jobs.
No bank should lend more than its deposits. Banks cannot be allowed to create money out of thin air, while all the rest of us have to work hard just to get by.
Each and everyone should have the freedom to choose how to live their lives free from illness, hunger or fear. Establish a permanent freedom income of $800 per month, for every American. Pay for the income like Alaska did with a sovereign carbon fund. If this is not enough, finance it with a sovereign capital fund, funded by a progressive fee on excessive capital.
Hard-working Americans should have the right to inhabit housing assets that are left unused for more than one year for the purpose of speculation.
Last summer, Matthias Schmelzer and Andrea Vetter, both from the Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie in Leipzig, published the book ‘Degrowth/Postwachstum’. With this book, they provide the first introduction to degrowth in German. For lack of a good German translation of ‘degrowth’ they use ‘Postwachstum’ more or less as a synonym. First they describe how our societies came to depend on growth, and they...
In a recently published article in Nature Climate Change, Jeroen van den Bergh argues that neither degrowth nor green-growth strategies might lead to sufficient climate action and hence makes the case for a third option which he calls “agrowth”. While the understanding of degrowth reflected in the article can certainly be disputed – it comes across as mainly targeting a shrinking GDP – his conc...
Von Matthias Schmelzer Der folgende Artikel wird in erweiterter Form im “Atlas der Globalisierung” erscheinen. Der neue Atlas, herausgegeben von Le Monde diplomatique und dem Kolleg Postwachstumsgesellschaften (Universität Jena) wird unter dem Motto “Weniger wird mehr. Der Postwachstums-Atlas” auf verschiedene Aspekte von Wachstum und Postwachstum konzentrieren. Er erscheint in einer kostenfreien Vorabversion zur Degrowth-Konferenz 2014 und [...]
