And one of the most important among those rights was the right to a job.
When capitalism fails to provide for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, when the so-called "free market" fails to provide for the "General Welfare," which happens regularly because those things are not the job of capitalism, then logically those responsibilities fall to government.
It's why we created our government.
And that means making the government the employer of last resort.
But it's not enough to just have a job.
Americans need to be able to make good wages and have good benefits so that they can take care of their families -- and not have to worry about where their next meal is going to come from.
That's why we need to raise the minimum wage to at least $10.10 per hour - so that everyone has a chance to live comfortably and to make a decent living.
It's insane that giant corporations like Walmart are raking in billions and billions of dollars in profits each year, but are paying their workers bottom-of-the-barrel wages that are impossible to survive on.
While working-class Americans get back on their feet, we need to ensure that the United States' wealthy elite are doing their fair share to support the economy and our country.
We need to roll back the Reagan tax cuts, and make sure that a family struggling to survive day-to-day isn't paying a greater share of their income in taxes than a Wall Street billionaire bankster.
And we can use some of the ill-gotten gains of US billionaires to help rebuild our nation's crippling infrastructure.
Right now, over 600,000 bridges in the US are considered "structurally deficient."
Our roads are buckling, our electrical grids are crashing and are transportation systems look like ancient relics.
According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, we need to spend at least $3.5 trillion by 2020 just to bring ourselves up-to-date.
We need to stop playing politics, and start making the investments needed to prevent our country from literally falling apart.
And, of course, we won't even have a country to invest in if we don't do more to fight the devastating effects of climate change and global warming.
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