We will pass the nation’s first wealth tax in order to fund the nation’s most ambitious loan forgiveness plan to keep and bring our kids home. We will guarantee child care for every working family, career and higher education for every dedicated student, and more than $300 million to build a public education system that works for every kid, no matter their zip code, ability, or parents. That means funding PEIA, teacher raises to match neighboring states, and a curriculum that lets teachers teach. We will choose arts and music and cursive and balancing a checkbook and entrepreneurship and life skills and career education… over endless testing. We will finally answer the mandate set forth by Recht Decision, and promise equality in education.

We will fight for Medicare for All at the federal level. At the state level, we will fight for the nation’s most aggressive price caps for medicine and health insurance prices. That means a state Pharmacy Benefits Manager, price caps for life-saving drugs like insulin, a Health Insurance Commissioner, tripling support for free health clinics, and a state-based public option for individuals and small businesses. Cost savings will go right back to consumers, as well as volunteer firefighters, EMS, and other first responders who deserve workers comp, higher pay, and a training system that makes sense. And in the end, we will win our fight against mental illness and substance use disorder, because we will choose the side of people in recovery who have crafted the nation’s most ambitious plan for harm reduction, prevention, recovery jobs programs, trauma-informed schools, and an effort to push resources and recovery centers into every community of our state. 

We will stop forcing our entrepreneurs to play a rigged game with out-of-state monopolies. Every penny saved by ending corporate tax giveaways, exposing sweetheart deals, and making PILOT agreements more accountable is a penny earned for the nation’s most ambitious set of tax breaks, friendly regulations, and capital investments for small businesses, entrepreneurs, farmers, artists, and cooperatives. We will establish a WV Arts Council, invest in outdoor recreation, and fully legalize cannabis. We will build the broadband middle mile and invest in local ownership of the last mile–to break the Frontier monopoly and embolden every student, every distant worker, every entrepreneur who wants to make West Virginia their home. At long last, we will open the State Bank of West Virginia to speed up small business growth, infrastructure financing, and eventually to start returning dividends to the people of our state. This is how we rebuild our economy. Not by pretending to be Pittsburgh or Denver, not by wooing Amazon and Wal-mart–but by investing in our small towns and making West Virginia the best place in the country to live, work, and start a business.

Our aim is not merely to change who sits in the Governor’s seat. We must also change who governs. We will limit campaign spending, implement automatic voter registration, end election buying, tax and restrict corporate lobbying, end the revolving door, and adopt the most ambitious program in the country for the public financing of elections. The size of your bank account should have no correlation with your ability to serve the public. We need cleaner elections and transparent governance: regional deputy governors to bring state government to you, grantwriters bringing millions to every holler, an office of the Inspector General to police waste, a Public Service Commission run by and for consumers–not industries–and taxpayer councils to ensure that every agency in the executive branch is run by the people who hurt the most and work the hardest… and not those who profit from our pain and our work. We will also fix the damn roads, by listening to our engineers instead of political appointees, by choosing maintenance over catastrophe, by taxing the trucks that do the damage, and by choosing accountable, union labor and delivering on the pay scale raises promised to DOH workers.

We will pass the nation’s most ambitious Workers Bill of Rights–reversing Right to Work, reinstating Prevailing Wage, Equal Pay for Equal Work, Earned Sick Days, Family Leave, a beefed up WV Jobs Act, and collective bargaining for all state employees. We will pass a $15 minimum wage–with corresponding small business tax cuts–so every worker can live with dignity and every small business owner can afford to pay. We will fix our upside-down tax system, so that the people who have the least no longer pay the most. We will win the nation’s strongest Earned Income Tax Credit and end off-shore tax havens. We will launch Corporate Crime and Political Corruption divisions in our state police–so that our state’s white collar criminals can no longer hide. Most important, we will raise the severance tax on natural gas to pay for the most ambitious public works program since the New Deal–more than 32,000 living wage jobs created in water and broadband infrastructure, the arts, outdoor recreation, public services, senior services, and our small business revolution.

We know that safe water and rich land are not the enemies of economic development. They are the foundation for it. We will win the most ambitious land and water protections in Appalachian history. We will choose local food and farmers over Big Agriculture and pass a new Homestead Act that chooses local landowners and counties over out-of-state landholding companies that steal from us everyday. We will multiply by 10 the costs for water violations and gas permits–and use their money to rebuild, modernize, and consolidate our 690 crumbling water and sewage systems. We will pass the Modern Jobs Act, Power Purchase Agreements, establish an Office of Outdoor Education, and more. We will squeeze every cent we can from coal and gas executives, so that every coal miner and gas worker is guaranteed a job long-term and West Virginia will lead the clean energy economy for generations to come.

We will choose the side of seniors, by finally ending the Social Security income tax–and starting a seniors jobs program to address their needs around transportation, recreation, health care, housing, and more. We will choose the side of women, and advance the nation’s most ambitious guarantee of child care, health care, education, reproductive rights, and economic opportunity. We will choose the side of Black and Brown people, and pass the nation’s most ambitious plan to end mass incarceration and attack the racial discrimination that persists in education, hiring, and health care. We will choose the side of the LGBTQ+ community, and pass the nation’s strongest EHNDA laws, ban conversion therapy, and recognize the dignity of every human being. We will choose the side of homeless people, fighting to end homelessness at its core. We will choose the side of veterans by guaranteeing not only higher education and job opportunities, but also the nation’s most ambitious suicide prevention plan, the veterans nursing home in Beckley, and a tax credit for those who have served. We will choose the side of miners, by granting a state Black Lung Pension Fund and a jobs guarantee. And we will choose the side of people with disabilities, by clearing the IDD/Waiver waiting list, ending discrimination in pay and transportation, implementing the Olmstead Act, and growing a disability jobs program. If we fight each other, we lose. If we fight for each other, we win.