Jill Stein revealed the issues that would be her top priority to resolve if she becomes president of the United States. Stein, the Green Party’s nominee for POTUS, recently sat down for a lengthy interview with Jeff Stein, a reporter on politics and policy at Vox, where she tackled some crucial issues that the American people are facing.
The medical doctor shared her solution for the nation’s big problems. Among the issues she opened about were the massive student debt, immigration, Russia, gun control, and trade.
In that same interview, Stein, who is very concerned about the connection between people’s health and the quality of their local environment and who has been arrested numerous times while protesting the construction of pipelines, had a lot to say about climate change and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Stein took a shot at Hillary Clinton in the exchange.
Jeff Stein asked Jill Stein, how she would cancel $1.3 trillion in student debt? She said:
“And that is that for every dollar we invest in higher education, we get back $7 in return. This is what we learned through the GI Bill following the Second World War. That for every dollar that went into it we got $7 in return in public benefits and increased revenues. It’s just a question of jump-starting the system, and then it pays for itself.”
On immigration, Stein had the following to say:
“We call for two major things regarding the immigration crisis — legalizing and creating a welcome path to citizenship for the immigrants who have always been at the core of our economies, our communities, and our culture. We call for celebrating the immigrants — we’re all immigrants on this bus in this country. The second thing we call for is actually fixing this immigration crisis. The most important thing we can do is to stop causing the immigration crisis in the first place, through policies like NAFTA, which not only sent our jobs overseas but which destroyed millions of jobs for farmers and factory workers south of the border.”
On gun control, she shared:
“So, we establish background checks and assault weapons ban as a floor. And we add to that stripping the gun manufacturers of their immunity — so currently they have immunity right now from lawsuits holding them accountable for dangerous weapons, and for putting those weapons in the hands of dangerous people. That’s another tool that should be brought to bear that does not have issues with the Second Amendment.”
On NATO and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the candidate stated:
“In terms of NATO, I think NATO has become an end-run around a democratic process for deciding when we engage in foreign wars and when we don’t. We’re using NATO as an excuse — not only to duck congressional responsibility for approving a war budget, but also NATO is used to duck the UN process and international law that says we cannot go to war unless a nation is specifically threatened and directly threatened.”
On raising the minimum wage to $15, she explained:
“So, I am quite confident a $15 minimum wage is going to be extraordinarily helpful to our economy. There are some stresses that will take place in small businesses; those stresses should be compensated for by the improvement in their income, in their business. So we know that there is a balance that works at $15 an hour and there have been a lot of studies to that effect.”
On her Green New Deal to reduce global warming, she said:
“I don’t think Hillary Clinton is going to mobilize that progressive groundswell — she’s not, and it’s by actually doing what we need to do that we can mobilize 42 million students in debt, for example, to come out and win this vote and drive into Congress the progressive change that we need in the form of our representation.”
She added:
“So we call for 20 million new jobs in a Green New Deal, like the New Deal that got us out of the Great Depression. These jobs are focused on 100 percent clean, renewable energy by 2030.”
The Green Party candidate sits around four percent in recent national polls.
