In this era of political divisiveness, it’s easy to forget that at least one thing unites us all, from the extreme left to the extreme right and everywhere in between: We all want a better world for our children and grandchildren. “Contract with the future” is an attempt to get voters and politicians to focus on supporting policies that will make a better world for generations to come.

The following is a first draft. What do you think? Should we try to push this effort forward? You may post comments and suggestions below, or send an e-mail to admin@contractwiththefuture.org.

Our primary responsibility as citizens, voters, and politicians is not to any particular policy, interest group, or political party. Rather, it is to our children, grandchildren, and all generations to come.

In signing this contract, we pledge to evaluate every potential action or policy in terms of whether it will make the country and the world a better place for our children and grandchildren. If we conclude that it will, then we will support it, even if it requires short-term sacrifices and/or compromises on our own behalf.

Specific Goals

1. National and Global Security: We recognize that living in a world that is deeply interconnected with a rapidly growing population will pose ever-greater challenges for our own security and the security of others. In order to ensure the security of our children and grandchildren, we therefore will support policies that accomplish the following:
   • We believe in the American ideals of freedom and democracy, and therefore will support policies that help the rest of the world move toward those ideals.
   • We must enact policies that will prevent continued nuclear proliferation and, following the bipartisan prescriptions of the group led by Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, William Perry, and Sam Nunn, we must move us toward a world free of nuclear arms.
   • The threats posed by intolerance, hatred, and terrorism must be combated at every level. We will work with the global community to ensure an international response to halt any genocide, indiscriminate killing, or persecution based on physical attributes or personal beliefs. We will also work to raise global living standards and global health, in order to provide opportunity for all.
   • The global arms trade that allows easy access by terrorists to weapons must be curtailed.
   • As addressed in more detail below, we must recognize that global warming poses a significant security threat that must be urgently addressed.
2. Energy: We currently get most of our energy from sources that are not sustainable for our children and grandchildren, both because they are limited resources and because of the high costs they impose on us through their demand for military resources to ensure their supply, the health effects caused by their pollution, and the environmental damage caused in their production and use. We therefore support policies that:
   • End our use of imported oil, which largely results in our providing financial resources to states and groups that do not share our American ideals.
   • Move our economy away from dependence on fossil fuels, because the damages they are causing pose an existential threat to our modern civilization.
   • Move our economy toward energy sources that can be sustained long-term and therefore represent technologies that our children and grandchildren will still be able to depend on.
   • Support investment in research on potentially game-changing energy sources for the future, such as nuclear fusion, solar energy from space, and advanced biofuels.
3. Environment: It is crucial that we protect the environment for our children and grandchildren, so that they can inherit a world that is just as beautiful and hospitable as the one that we have the privilege to live in. We therefore will enact polices that:
   • Preserve the natural beauty and biological diversity of our planet by protecting and preserving the oceans, forests, deserts, and other natural treasures for the benefit of future generations.
   • Recognizing that the vast majority of scientists who have studied the issue in depth believe that global warming poses a serious threat to our children and grandchildren, we must enact policies to stop the rise of the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases and thereby minimize the risks to future generations. We must do this through policies that can appeal across the political spectrum, and with that in mind, we favor keeping this issue separate from other budgetary issues by implementing a revenue-neutral “carbon tax and dividend” plan such as that promoted by the Citizens’ Climate Lobby or the Climate Leadership Council.
   • Population growth is a hot-button issue that raises concerns for people on many levels, but there is no question that the rapid rate of population growth of the past century cannot be sustained; global population is already more than 4 times what it was 100 years ago, and it’s clearly unrealistic to think that it could quadruple again without terrible consequences to the environment, living standards, and global security. Therefore, efforts to reduce global birth rates must be a key part of any strategy that will protect the interests of our children and grandchildren.
4. Education: Humanity’s future depends on having a citizenry is educated enough to understand the issues and to develop the technologies and businesses needed to address the challenges we will inevitably face. We will therefore seek policies that ensure that high-qualilty education is available to all children. We recognize that there will be significant differences of opinion in how to reach this goal, but we can agree on the following principles:
   • Education must be highly valued, which means that high-quality teachers must be highly valued and that every student should have access to such teachers and a positive learning environment.
   • Education must be the top priority for our children, meaning that they must spend enough time in school and studying so that they have the greatest possible odds of success in their education.
   • Education must not be politicized or treated as anyone’s special interest. The students must come first, even if that means changes to policies that currently protect adults (including teachers and administrators) or corporate interests.
   • To ensure that the above principles can be met, we must adequately fund education at all levels, from pre-K through college.
5. Investing in the future: We live the way we do today because of the forward-looking decisions made by prior generations. Cases in point for Americans include the brilliance of our nation’s founders in creating the organizing principles of our democracy and the Constitution on which it is based; the long-term efforts and sacrifices made in the cause of abolishing slavery and advancing civil rights; the Marshall plan that helped turn former enemies into allies; and the investments in highway building and the space program that reshaped transportation and technology. Using these and others as models for what we must do to invest in the future for our children and grandchildren, we will support policies to:
   • Improve and expand the nation’s infrastructure. This means not only bringing existing infrastructure up to modern safety and reliability standards, but also building new infrastructure for transportation, energy delivery, data transport, and more so that future generations can do more than we can do today.
   • We must work to achieve “great things” that will inspire our children and lay the groundwork for the future. These great things should include a commitment to exploration that pushes the boundaries of human horizons. Examples include increased exploration of the deep oceans, the creation of a permanent human presence on the Moon and on Mars, and ongoing robotic and telescope exploration of the distant solar system and universe.
   • As part of our efforts to lead the world by example, we should invest in a “global Marshall Plan” that will help the rest of the world benefit from the same types of investments that we make here at home.
6. The National Budget: Many of the prescriptions above will require substantial financial resources, but we cannot continue to build an unsustainable debt that will place a crushing burden on future generations. Therefore: we will support legislation that accomplishes the following:
   • Based on nonpartisan accounting by the Congressional Budget Office, the legislation should lead to a balanced budget within 10 years and then must bring down the long-term debt to no more than 50% of GDP within 30 years.
   • The legislation must include real changes that begin immediately, ensuring that any fiscal pain is shared by people today as well as by people over the period during which we move toward sustainable debt.
   • Inaction is not an option, since that only allows the current situation to worsen. We will compromise as needed on all budgetary issues — taxes, spending, and entitlements — in order to get a deal that accomplishes the above two goals, even while allowing for the financial investments needed to achieve our larger set of goals.
   • Tax reform should be a critical component of this action, with the goals of simplicity and fairness. While opinions may vary on what is most fair, the fairness decision should be based on the total tax burden on each individual (that is, including federal income taxes, FICA, state and local taxes, etc.).
7. Politics: We believe that the vast majority of Americans would wholeheartedly support all of the above, but our ability to implement these policies has been severely impeded by our dysfunctional political process. We must therefore reform the process in ways that will allow greater compromise and flexibility in the cause of seeking a better future for our children and grandchildren. Toward that end, we support the following key reforms:
   • Redistricting: The current process leads to too many districts in which the primary becomes the main hurdle to election, which tends to lead to more politically polarizing candidates. Redistricting should be reformed so that it is always undertaken either by a nonpartisan panel or through some mathematical formula that is not subject to political manipulation.
   • Voting Integrity: The voting process has lost integrity at every level from registration to the accurate counting of votes. A national commission should create uniform standards for voter registration and the voting process with the twin goals of (1) making it as easy as possible for all citizens to cast a vote and (2) ensuring that every vote is legitimate and properly counted.
   • Voting Process: In an era of multi-candidate slates, too often the winner of an election has not received a majority of votes and therefore lacks any kind of real mandate. While there is no perfect solution to this problem, we can surely do better than we do today. For example,  potential solutions might include instituting ranked choice voting or runoff elections between the top two candidates in cases in which no candidate receives a majority.
   • The Constitution created three branches of government for a reason, and it makes no sense to have the judicial branch — which was intended to be independent — subject to the political whims of voting. Judges at all levels should be appointed to fixed terms by executives and approved by legislature.
   • Elections should not be bought by individuals, corporations, or special interest groups. While it may be difficult to come up with a set of laws that will intelligently limit the influence of money on elections, this is no reason to stop trying. We do not presume to know the solutions, but we will support efforts to find them.
   • Political Parties: Neither of the two major political parties has demonstrated the type of vision or leadership necessary to implement a Contract With the Future. If they are unable to step and lead this effort, then a new political party should be created and based on this Contract.
8. Immigration: Immigration has been a contentious issue that touches on national security, the environment, and more. Nevertheless, we believe that certain principles should be widely agreed upon:
   • The United States is a nation of immigrants, and there is no doubt that immigration has been a net benefit to us overall.
   • That said, any nation has a limited ability to absorb immigrants at any particular time, and it is critical that the rate of immigration be consistent with our ability to help new citizens become self-sufficient and to learn and appreciate American values of liberty, justice, and equality for all. Recognition of this fact should make it possible to come to a consensus on the appropriate level of immigration that our nation should support.
   • Ultimately, the best way to achieve a reasonable level of immigration is to create a world in which people can feel safe and have economic opportunities no matter where they live — a goal already embodied above under National and Global Security — which will thereby reduce the number of people who feel compelled to leave their home countries. In the meantime, if we have more people attempting to immigrate than our nation can reasonably absorb, we must ensure that arriving immigrants are treated humanely and fairly, and in accord with our laws on asylum, even in cases where it is necessary to return them to their home countries.
9. Health Care: We left health care to last because it is has been so contentious and because it is arguably more complex than any of the other issues. Nevertheless, we believe that almost everyone agrees that excellent health care should be accessible to all, and the question is how best to make that possible at reasonable cost. As a result, we believe that our focus on making a better world for future generations allows us to see a potential compromise that might otherwise be elusive. In particular:
   • Americans have been arguing about health care policies for decades, and it is unrealistic to think we can settle the argument quickly. More specifically, it seems highly unlikely that the “repeal and replace” crowd will convince the “single payer” crowd, or vice versa. Therefore, we should instead create a process that, while it may take many years to play out, will ensure that the same argument will not still be going on decades from now.
   • With that in mind, we should start by trying to improve the existing health care system, but with an allowance for more drastic change if that is unsuccessful. Our specific recommendation is the following: (1) Congress should act immediately to try to improve the existing Affordable Care Act, without scrapping it, while also creating (perhaps with the help of an independent, expert commission) a set of metrics that would allow us to determine whether the improvements are working. (2) After 5 years, based on the success of the initial set of improvements, Congress will enact a second set of improvements, while also setting new milestones that will be used for evaluation at the end of the subsequent 5 years. (3) When 10 years have passed in total, Congress would decide whether the existing system is workable, and if not, would implement a different system (one that might in principle be dramatically different), informed by lessons learned, which would be given a similar 10-year trial period.
   • In this way, we have at least some hope of having established a viable system that works for everyone within 10 years, and a method for making sure the process does not go on endlessly if the first system is not deemed sufficiently successful.