I’m excited about the Presidential elections coming up. With all the lip service given to health care, taxes, climate change and foreign policy, I thought: if I could have the next President’s ear, what would I ask him to focus on? Here are my three platforms:
1) Change our national infrastructure: Since at least the 1950s, our priorities have been geared to provide Americans with property ownership. That translates into the rise of surbubias, accompanied by accessible highway systems, the rise of cheap big cars and the suppression of fuel prices. If you want to see the results of those policies, look no further than Los Angeles, Atlanta and Houston. Dead city centers, urban sprawls. How our cities and communities organize is central to our (wasteful) energy policy, our dearth of innovation – cultural and business – and our materialism that is a cancer on our national savings and is the root cause of our economic doldrums.
Change the national infrastructure to nurture cities, culture and communities – and we can begin to tackle the root causes of many of our failings.
2) Improve our education infrastructure: Lack of funding in the sciences, a deprioritzation of core skills and an emphasis on ‘diploma’ success has eroded our ability to innovate, to utilize technology and advancement in knowledge to move the goalposts of supply and demand. You don’t keep dividing up the pie between the haves and have nots, between domestic jobs and overseas labor – you make the pie larger.
3) Incentivize farmers to grow crops that meets their local communities’ needs. Big Corn is as devious as Big Oil and Big Auto, contributing to our national health malaise. Monsanto and crew have a stronghold on the basic tenets of civilization – food production – and their policies of pushing corn and soybean as the main crops have led to skyrocketing health care costs, ecological and environment degradation and a host of secondary consequences, from innovations in alternative fuels to the plummeting dollar value to the poverty in Africa.
Three Issues for the next POTUS
