Healthy families build strong communities. Yet a rapidly changing economy has created conditions that have badly hurt many American families. Part-time and freelance employment are replacing permanent jobs with benefits and workplace pressures increase even as our social safety net has been weakened. Policymakers are ripping apart immigrant families without regard for their contributions.
We must embrace and directly support real family values: not the fake rhetoric that for too long has passed as family values. Among them:
- Assuring all families have access to health care by fighting for a single-payer system that covers all Americans
- Easing the tax burden on middle-class families, not just on the wealthy
- Fostering small & family-run businesses
- Easing access to child care
- Providing for paid family leave when a baby arrives, a child falls ill, or an aging parent experiences a medical emergency
- Protecting marriage equality
- Giving equal access to scholarship and education grants for all American families.
- Enhancing social support and alimonies for middle and lower-class families.
- Providing higher pensions for the elderly without close relatives.
- Offering additional financial aid for college education in multiple-children families.