Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate, has some of the same policy positions heard during the primaries from former Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders.
One of the main similarities is her position on campaign financing. Stein and the Green Party advocate for publicly funded elections, don’t accept money from corporations or lobbyists and don’t have Super PACs. Stein also supports free public higher education and a Medicare for all health care program like Sanders did.
Stein, who also ran for president in 2012, is calling for open presidential debates. This would allow her and her running mate, human rights activist Ajamu Baraka, as well as Libertarians Gary Johnson and Bill Weld, onto the debate stages. The current rule only allows candidates with 15 percent of support from the public, based on national polls, into the debates.
Stein doesn’t currently meet that requirement, but here’s a look at what she might argue for if she were in the debates:
The environment
Not surprisingly, Stein says climate change is the greatest threat facing humanity. She supports a transition to 100 percent clean, renewable energy by 2030. Stein calls the plan the Green New Deal, which she says will also create jobs.
In an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Stein said the plan would pay for itself because by improving air quality through use of renewable energy, people will be healthier and health care costs will go down.
“The savings in health care alone is enough to pay for the green energy transition,” she said.
Immigration
Stein has said she wants to “create a welcoming path to citizenship” for immigrants. She said immigration has contributed to the strength, diversity and creativity in the United States.
Foreign policy
Stein says she would cut military spending by 50 percent, close all military bases around the world and end “catastrophic regime-change wars.” In an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Stein said her plan to fight ISIS would include a weapons embargo on the Middle East, a freeze on the funding for nations that give money to terrorists and closing the border between Turkey and Iraq and Syria.
Stein recently said she would not have made the order to assassinate Osama bin Laden. Rather, she would have ordered a trial in accordance with international law.
Taxes
According to the platform on her website, Stein wants to cut taxes for working families, the poor and middle class. She calls for making “Wall Street, big corporations and the rich pay their fair share of taxes.”
Health insurance
Stein advocates for a Medicare for all single-payer program. She says she would eliminate the “$400 billion annually spent on the paperwork and bureaucracy of health insurance,” according to her platform.
Drugs
Stein is supportive of legalizing marijuana. She also says the country should end the war on drugs and “treat drug issues as a public health issues, not as a crime.”
Education
Stein calls for free public higher education. She also says the government should abolish student debt. “Somehow we came up with the money — it turned out to be about $16 trillion — to bail out the crooks on Wall Street who crashed the economy. Isn’t it time that we bail out an entire generation that’s basically been locked in debt?” Stein said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”
Trade
Stein is not a supporter of NAFTA and other free trade agreements that she says “export American jobs, depress wages and undermine the sovereign right of Americans and citizens of other countries to control their own economy and political choices.”
Abortion
Stein says she believes reproductive health choices are between a woman and her physician.
LGBT community
As part of her platform on equality, Stein says she would protect the LGBT community from discrimination, but her platform does not offer more details about how she would do this.
