College Affordability
Matthew believes that, in order to give all Americans, regardless of socio-economic condition, access to higher education, the government should take the following steps: make tuition free at all public and community colleges, cut student loan interest rates and allow those with the older rates to refinance their loans, crack down on for-profit schools, and create new scholarship opportunities for high-achieving students. All of these things will be paid for with a tax on Wall Street speculation.
Criminal Justice Reform
Although the United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, we have almost 25 percent of the total prison population. Matthew believes every police department in the nation should have body cameras to improve transparency and accountability on both sides of the lens. Matthew believes that we should allocate federal funding to police training programs, where the art of de-escalation can be learned. Matthew also believes in reforming mandatory minimum sentences for low-level nonviolent offenses, increase support for mental health and drug treatment, support legislation to end racial profiling, and pursue alternative punishments for low-level offenders, especially young people.
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Foreign Policy
Matthew believes that we need to negotiate by using “diplomacy through strength”. He believes the United States must lead on a global stage, not just to advance the national security interests of our country, but also to make the world a better place. In order to accomplish this, Matthew believes that we must have a powerful and respected military, maintain strong alliances with countries from every corner of the globe, most important of which is the NATO alliance. He believes that war should certainly be a last result, but must remain an option so long as we use it extremely sparingly. He believes, finally, that Russia’s actions in Ukraine and Georgia and in our elections, China’s actions in the South China Sea, North Korea’s actions in regards to the advancement of their nuclear program, and the actions of terrorist groups across the globe, are all extremely dangerous to the United States, and must be met with strong diplomacy and stopped.
Immigration Reform
Matthew believes that we are a nation of immigrants. Matthew's great-great-grandfather and mother traveled from Southern Italy to the United States in the early 1900's. Their story, his story, our story is a story of America: hard-working families coming to the United States to create a brighter future for their children. Matthew believes that we should not be talking about sweeping up millions of men, women, and children, many of whom have been here for years, and throwing them out of the country. He does, however, believe that we are also a nation of laws. He believes we cannot continue to allow people to come across our borders without doing it in a legal manner, and we need to increase border security. A wall, however, is a horrible idea. The wealthy drug dealers can simply buy a plane and fly over, and other people could climb up with ropes and ladders, or climb under. It wouldn’t stop the flow of illegal immigration, but would cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Instead, Matthew believes we should invest in better technology for our border security agents. Finally, he believes that anyone who came here illegally should be fined, but then given a path to citizenship, so that they can become integrated in the American fabric, get a job, and pay taxes.
Legalization of Marijuana
Matthew believes that marijuana is a dangerous drug, but he also believes that it becomes more dangerous in the “black market”. If the government legalized marijuana usage, they could regulate sales, perhaps only allowing small dosages for sale at once and un-laced marijuana regulations. They can also tax sales of marijuana, creating far more revenue for important programs that need funding. Finally, the police spend a lot of their time finding marijuana users, but if it were legalized, the police could focus on arresting rapists, murderers, etc.
Medicare for All
Matthew believes that, in order to finally have a truly universal healthcare system, we need to transition into a single-payer government program. The United States spends far more than any other industrialized nation in the world on healthcare. In order to fix this, we need to cut out the “middle-man” that is the insurance industry. Rather than paying through two private industries that both need to make profits, we should solely pay the doctors. We also need to start negotiating with drug companies to bring the costs of their products down to a reasonable and affordable level. He believes that the Affordable Care Act was extremely successful, and was a huge supporter, but does have flaws and doesn’t cover every American, and needs to be replaced with a universal, single-payer, plan.
Public Transportation Reform
Matthew believes that public transportation creates jobs, reduces our carbon footprint, reduces gasoline consumption, saves money, and drives community revitalization. Matthew believes that too many Americans drive cars to travel, which is hurts the environment and forces them to spend thousands of dollars on gasoline per year. If we improved our public transportation systems by making faster trains and more stations, more jobs would be created, Americans would spend less on gasoline, and the United States government will spend less on oil.
Social Security
Matthew believes that we should expand social security, not privatize or cut it. Social Security has a $2.8 trillion surplus, and can easily pay all of the benefits owed to Americans for the next 19 years. If we end, cut, or privatize Social Security, we’ll only be taking money from every American who has paid into it over the period of their lifetimes.
Uncorrupting Politics
Matthew believes that our government is corrupt and must be reformed, starting with a constitutional amendment ending the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision. If wealthy people and large, multinational, corporations are flooding their money into the political system, it will inherently favor them, and has since then. Matthew believes that, in order to have a truly level playing-field for all candidates, that elections should be publically funded.
Women's Rights
Matthew believes that we should never be denying women control over their own bodies, preventing access to vital medical and social services, and blocking equal pay for equal work. Abortion should be no one's business except for the women, her partner, and their doctor. The government (more specifically, Republicans in government) should never be able to block a women's ability to have control over her body. However, that doesn’t mean that he supports abortion. Matthew believes that abortion is morally wrong, but must be, legally, a right for anyone, in case of extreme circumstances. Also, no woman, should ever be offered a different salary than a man, just because she is a woman. We must have equal pay for equal work in the 21st century. No one can say that, in our country, women are treated equally with men, unless we do these vital things.
Creating Jobs
The real unemployment rate, workers who have given up looking for jobs, or those who are working part time when they want to work full time, is 10.3%, and over 50 percent of young African-Americans and more than one-third of white and Hispanic youth are looking for full-time work. Clearly, people are struggling to find work that can support them and their families. Matthew believes some of this must come from the public sector (creating jobs through investments in infrastructure), but most must come from the private sector. The private sector will rarely do the right thing on their own, and must be forced, through government intervention, to provide more, higher-paying, jobs to real people, instead of robots. He also believes that trade deals are generally good for the economy as a whole, but hit many communities, where the labor done is cheaper in other countries, very hard. He believes that, instead of promising them that their jobs will come back when it’s economically impossible, we need to invest in creating new, more secure, areas of work for people in these areas, allowing them to move with the country towards an economy more equipt for the 21st century and its challenges.
Environmental Protection and Alternative Energy
Matthew believes that it is clear that climate change exists and is created by human behavior, and that we are running out of time, as a planet, to change its course. He believes that the United States must lead the world in tackling climate change, if we are to make certain that this planet is habitable in the future. We must transform our energy system towards efficiency and sustainability. Millions of homes and buildings need to be weatherized, and we need to greatly accelerate technological progress in wind and solar power generation. He also believes that global cooperation is vital to a truly, global, problem, and that we need to rejoin the Paris Climate Accords.
Gun Violence Prevention
In 2013, alone, nearly 34,000 Americans were killed by guns. Approximately 240 Americans are shot each day. Matthew is a strong believer in 2nd Amendment rights, but believes that we must continue to make it more difficult to obtain such a dangerous weapon, in order to keep them out of the hands of violent terrorists. He supports increasing background checks and closing the Charleston Loophole, in order to create a safer country for everyone.
Income Inequality
Today, we live in the richest country in the history of the world, but that reality means little because much of that wealth is controlled by a tiny handful of individuals. Matthew believes that the rich are too rich, and the poor are too poor. The top one-tenth of one percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. 58 percent of all new income since the Wall Street crash has gone to the top one percent. He believes that, in order to solve these problems, we need better social welfare programs, such as an expansion of welfare and social security, and the implementation of free public college programs. He also believes that we need better labor laws, such as restrictions to working during non-work hours, and we need to strengthen labor unions.
K-12 Education
Matthew believes that every American child deserves a high-class education. Matthew believes that teachers have too much job security, and tenure should be eliminated, because there are some teachers that aren’t reaching the standards that we expect from our educators. Teachers should be paid based on quality, not length of tenure. Teachers are a very important part of our country. They educate our future leaders, and for that reason Matthew supports increasing the salaries of the average teacher, so long as we remove the bad ones from the system. The average teacher makes $44,550 per year. Matthew thinks that a teacher's salary should be at least $60,000 per year.
Minimum Wage Increase
Matthew believes that millions of Americans are working for totally inadequate wages. We must ensure that no full-time worker lives in poverty. The current federal minimum wage is starvation pay and must become a living wage. We must increase it to $15 an hour over the next several years. We also must increase the minimum wage each time inflation changes, to match it. Why would someone work for $7.25 per hour when they could receive far more living off of the government? They need to be incentivized to join the workforce by having the ability to earn more for themselves and their families.
Racial Equality
Although the United States has made a lot of progress in expanding non-white rights, we still have a long way to go, until all Americans are equal. Minorities are being discriminated against by the police, the courts, and by the Republicans' discriminatory voting laws. We must make the police force more accountable, creating a more peaceful America. We should force every police officer to wear a camera on their helmet, which would make it easier to see if the officer was doing the right thing. Second, we must end the "war on drugs", which clearly discriminates against African-Americans. One out of every four black males, born today, can expect to spent time in prison. Finally, we must repeal Voter I.D. laws, which have been squashing the black vote for years, or ensure that people of all races have equal access to those I.D.’s.
Wall Street Reform
Matthew believes that Wall Street cannot gamble trillions of dollars in financial instruments, and expect American taxpayers to pay for their losses. He believes that we need to break up the financial institutions that are "too-big-to-fail". Finally, Matthew believes that Wall Street should fully pay back the American taxpayers for bailing them out in 2008.
