Here’s what you won’t get at either the Happy Hour Debate or the Main Event of the top ten candidates:
Real solutions for the middle class crisis we face — our most central issue. Between Democrats and Republicans over twenty candidates have thrown their hats in the ring — every one claims to be the champion of the middle class.
What solutions have they proposed?
A pretty stale serving of the same-old: Doubling the capital gains rate; fixing our infrastructure by hiking the gas tax; bumping minimum wage; taking the world’s biggest most complex budgeting process to something called zero based budgeting — a boil the ocean approach that says you start from scratch and everyone competes for dollars every year (Can you imagine the gridlock?); “fixing” education and my favorite “Create more jobs” — as if saying it has anything to do with making good jobs happen.
How about some real solutions that address:
> Create jobs but also educate Americans to fill the 4 million already existing but unfilled skill based jobs
> Solve the NEETS crisis — there are 4 million Americans between the ages of 16–25 that are ‘Not in Education, Employment, or Training’
> Create the American Infrastructure Development Bank. Galvanize the business community, unions, and government to create jobs and rebuild the country.
How about describing how you actually create a job?
What you won’t get in the debates occupies this dialogue between Charlie Rose and author Peter D. Kiernan as they discuss his book American Mojo: Lost and Found — Restoring our middle class before the world blows by. They talk about real issues and how to fix them without raising taxes for every fresh idea.