Chapter 00
At a Glance: The Mission for America
At a Glance: The Mission for America
The Mission for America is a comprehensive, 10-year plan to overcome the twin crises facing the United States and the world:
The failure to provide expected economic security and progress for most Americans and billions of people globally — a failure that is breaking the international post-war social compact and threatening the survival of liberal democracy; and
the failure to avert catastrophic global warming, which, if the trend of the last few years continues, threatens life on earth as we know it this century.
This first edition of the Mission for America lays out a detailed plan for what could be achieved in ten years given expected economic, environmental, and technologic realities of the near future. We have designed the Mission for America to be feasible given only one change in the political landscape: That a U.S. president with a bold and unified team wins a simple majority in both chambers of Congress (and suspend the filibuster) — and that they do so by enlisting the country in this Mission for America, or something like it, to reverse national decline, avert deadly global warming, and build a sustainable economy capable of providing prosperity for all.
In this general introduction, we cover the central concepts, institutions and tools of the Mission for America, starting with the idea of a national mission itself. The Mission for America is divided into a number of projects which we call "national missions," each of which transforms a different sector of the economy or solves a significant problem. Reading a single national mission on its own, one might judge that it's too ambitious to be possible in a 10-year timeframe. The key to understanding the Mission for America is to see how the national missions work together to make each other possible.
Most U.S. climate plans aim only to reduce domestic output of greenhouse gasses. The Mission for America, on the other hand, is primarily designed to achieve an international climate goal as well as a domestic one. The U.S. accounts for only 15% of global emissions. Bringing the U.S. economy all the way to zero would barely affect the world's trajectory toward catastrophic warming. That's why the Mission for America is designed around the goal of supplying the world with everything it will need to get to net-zero as rapidly as possible, including technology, machines, materials, services, financing and leadership.
The Mission for America is based on an intellectual and policy framework of abundance. A national economy as large and advanced as America's is not a zero sum system. Reindustrialization does not come at the expense of our other national priorities — it's how we fulfill them.
Every modern industrialized nation except the U.S. has coordinating and financing institutions capable of activating labor capital on a large scale to develop new capacities and real wealth. The Mission for America calls for restoring our nation's capacity for public investment and economic coordination — primarily in the form of the World War II-era Reconstruction Finance Corporation — to drive not only economic growth and rising wealth, but the development of a sustainable economy that can provide prosperity for all.