… and why I would never get elected.

1. Those jobs are gone, buckaroo. They’re not coming back. Worldwide, manufacturing jobs are declining. Don’t blame the Chinese and the Mexicans, blame the robots. (Side note, this is exactly the reason we were so excited about robots forty years ago.)
2. The retirement age has to go up. The whole idea of Social Security was sort of an enforced savings account. Regular folk didn’t have the foresight to save for the future, so the government decided to do it for them. But rather than structure it as a regular savings account they did the math assuming you would die at a certain age. As people live longer, the math has to change. No biggie, right?
3. Except they looted Social Security anyway. The system is living hand to mouth; all those savings gone. What should be a vault with trillions of dollars instead has a slip of paper in it with the letters “IOU”. The problem is, the people who borrowed the money don’t show it as a debt on their books. As if they had no intention of paying it back. People at Enron went to jail for exactly this. The workers at Enron never recovered.
4. Miami is fucked. So is New Orleans, and other great coastal cities. If you live in one of those places, sell now before people catch on. Where I live… borderline, but I won’t get storm surges (even when the typhoon track turns north). It is simply too late to change our energy policies enough to save those places.
5. Oil is too damn cheap. The low price of oil damages far more than you know. Just one example: While massive boats burn incredibly dirty fuel, out-polluting entire cities to bring us cheap foreign goods, local businesses wither. You want to bring the jobs back home? Stop buying things brought to our shores for practically free, only to pay the price later when Corpus Christie is evacuated.
6. We are in conflict with radical Islam because of oil. If we weren’t propping up dictatorships in the Middle East, if we weren’t pumping great piles of cash to some pretty terrible people, if we we weren’t knocking over governments to keep the oil flowing, we could be part of the solution, rather than the bankroll for the problem.
7. Fracking… At the risk of harping on oil too much, the environmental free pass frackers have been given makes me sick to my stomach.
8. Military spending should be based on effectiveness for a relevant mission. Not jobs, not kickbacks to politicians. This isn’t welfare, it’s the security of our country.
9. Give me your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. We’re going to need those guys as we get older and Social Security goes belly-up. And maybe we take “breathing free” for granted. Ask people fleeing oppression what our nation stands for. Sometimes we forget.

There are more. I could probably say one thing a week to keep the memes humming over the course of a hopeless campaign.

There are other things I would also say, positive things, about the really great things this country is and could be. About ways to Keep America Great. Because this is a great country. We have some tough choices to make in the coming decades, and we will be challenged to overcome the sins of past leaders who dodged those questions. But if we can find a way to work harmoniously with the majority of nations on this planet who act like adults, there’s every reason to believe we can come through the coming trials intact.

We just have to stop fooling ourselves first.

1

Sweet!

Thanks!