You can’t fix something if you’re not measuring the right things. Right now, we use the stock market and GDP to measure our economy and the well-being of our people.

But even the creator of GDP thought it was a terrible measure for national well-being. Examples of us measuring the wrong thing can easily be seen today. Life expectancy, unity, mental health, patriotism, culture, and confidence have declined while the stock market and GDP have grown.

In short, we’re looking at the wrong things to measure how we’re doing as a country, and it’s killing many of us.

It’s time to expand how we measure performance to reflect how we’re doing. We need to look at life expectancy, freedom from substance abuse, childhood success rates, and meaningful retirement rates as crucial indicators of our country. 

We need to implement policies that rank policies by costs and benefits to all these metrics - not how rich a few stockholders get.

Problems to be Solved

The GDP doesn’t reflect cost of living, inflation rates,  stability, inequality, health, or happiness.

The United States has plummeted to twenty-seventh or lower along a various dimensions, including such basic measures as life expectancy, clean water, and infant mortality.

Reelection rates have nothing to do with legislative quality.

Currently, Congress doesn’t have any way to measure if they implement laws that will improve their constituents’ lives.

The inventor of GDP, Simon Kuznets, said its invention in 1934 was a terrible measure of the national well-being. He cautioned against using it as such. However, we are riding it into the ground eighty-seven years later.

Bobby Kennedy famously said GDP “does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play….it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

We Should

Our party will make decisions based on policy performance in open online cost-benefit analysis, measuring the likely performance of policy to meet our valid interests and goals. 

We will require our candidates to show which arguments they believe to be valid that each policy will result in improvements along the following potential costs or benefits resulting from the policy.

Use measurements such as, but not limited to:

1. Poverty rates

2. Life expectancy

3. Rates of Business formation

4. Clean Water

5. Crime Rates

6. Overdose deaths

7. Government Efficiency

8. Mental Health

9. Income Growth & Average Incomes

10. Affordability

11. Environmental Sustainability

12. Recidivism

13. Labor-force participation Rate

14. Military Readiness

15. Marriage Rates

16. Quality of Infrastructure

17. Rehabilitation Rates

18. Civic Engagement

19. Education Rates

20. Public Debt and Repayment Interest Loans