Newsday: Want Big Ideas? Listen to Howie Hawkins and Michael McDermott

From Lane Filler at Newsday:

If you spend much time talking to mainstream politicians, you can get bored. As they bicker over who wants to cut property taxes more without coming up with ways to limit the expenditures the taxes pay for, the eyelids droop. As they joust about the (largely nonexistent) difference between giving people here illegally a path to citizenship, a path to legal residency and a garden path to sweep at substandard wages while awaiting deportation, the mind wanders.

…

There are, though, candidates who want to talk about big ideas. It’s just that we’ve largely defined them as fringe folk, figures of fun who have no chance of seeing their ideals come to fruition and get little platform to espouse them.

Spend an hour talking to New York gubernatorial candidates Howie Hawkins of the Green Party or Libertarian Michael McDermott and you will not be bored. Both support actual ideologies they express honestly. And you don’t have to agree with them, particularly on tactics, to recognize that their goals deserve discussion.

Hawkins wants 100 percent clean, renewable energy by 2030, and plenty of government funding to ensure it. McDermott sees the same future of sustainable energy dominating and fossil fuels waning, but via the free market, not government subsidies. And both oppose hydrofracking for natural gas in New York. They don’t sort of think that maybe if the interminable studies officials have ordered not to be finished ever get finished, then with certain safeguards designed by supertintelligent robots, it might be or might not be safe to blah blah blah.

Hawkins wants a big state income tax increase on the wealthy and the reinstatement of a levy on every share of stock traded on Wall Street to let the state cut property taxes and send more money to municipalities, schools and universities. McDermott wants to abolish the state income tax over four years, which would return $40 billion a year to New Yorkers, and huge cuts in state spending.

Hawkins wants free, single-payer health care for everyone. McDermott wants individuals to have the freedom to pay for health care as they see fit.

Read the full article here.

Thanks to Mark Axinn for the link.