Take the High Road

The American Heritage® Dictionary defines High Road as:

NOUN:  1a. The easiest or surest path or course: the high road to happiness.   b. The most positive, diplomatic, or ethical course.

The American Legislative Issue Campaign Exchange (ALICE) defines High Road as high-wage, low-waste, worker-friendly, publicly-accountable economic development.  

Our goal includes targeted education and training systems, sustainable mass transportation and communication systems, and good services to modernize business. Building such things is an investment, and experience and analysis shows that this type of social spending has an eventual payback far exceeding original cost.

Unusual partners often unite behind high road development. Cities and inner-ring suburbs, workers and environmentalists, central city people of color and working class whites, organized labor and urban-based business owners:  These groups don’t always agree, but they should all support this new approach. Why?

• The high road is accountable.  For Democracy to work, citizens must have access to information and be able to participate.  They need to know how our tax dollars are being spent, and that the merit of a good idea will overcome the corporate money behind a bad one.
• The high road is efficient.  We're targeting subsidies and tax dollars carefully, instead of wasting precious resources on bad business and sprawl. We're making sure our money isn't wasted on bad jobs or short term gains.
• The high road is metropolitan.  We're locating employment and production in cities and inner-ring suburbs where people, skills and infrastructure are already densely packed. This combats poverty by placing jobs closer to low-income people who need them. It also helps the inner city stay vibrant and remain a place where people work as well as live.
• The high road promotes quality.   We're emphasizing high-quality, high-wage, high-skill, high value-added jobs over the opposite. These jobs are better for workers, and the firms providing them are more committed to the community, because they’ve spent resources training their high-skill workforce.
• The high road is sustainable.  We're thinking about the future, focusing on retention and upgrading, seeking to cooperate instead of compete with neighbors. At its best, it can promote good jobs that will survive the next decade and the next generation.
• The high road is green.  We're reducing sprawl by emphasizing downtown and inner ring development and renovation over ex-urban development of park, farm and forest land. This approach uses existing buildings instead of letting them turn into board-ups. It rewards environmentally-conscious firms that use green technologies and produce goods in sustainable ways.

The box to your right houses best practices in progressive high road policy.   There is a choice.  Start the Journey.

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