My problems are with 4. Bring manufacturing jobs back home.
I disagree mainly because those jobs are never coming home even if the companies move production back to the states, not in numbers enough to be worthwhile anyway. It is cheaper to automate and streamline production systems than it is to pay people a decent wage to do it, even without the increased costs that the other numbers on this list would bring, and that is okay. The future of American labor is not in manufacturing and hasn't been since those particular jobs started leaving, the sooner we accept this the better it will be for all of us.
Additionally, shipping labor overseas is only a temporary solution, yeah it gets cheap labor for the companies, but even that cheap labor often has an impact on the local economy, which leads to higher living conditions, and eventually people demanding higher wages, long term, unless companies manage to convince local governments to let them run their operations without any oversight, which happens more often than we'd like, but not universally, then it eventually starts costing an appreciable amount to operate, especially when you add in shipping costs back to the states, an expense that is pretty well tied to the petroleum market.
The fact is that unemployment is lower than it has been in a decade or so, and while it is true that unemployment figures don't account for the underemployed or those who have fallen off the rolls entirely, the fact is there are a lot of jobs here in the States even with manufacturing being on its way out. The problem is those are kind of shitty jobs, or at least they are made shitty by the problems that would be fixed by the first two numbers on the list.
The fact is that service industry workers work just as hard as anyone on the assembly line, and often in conditions just as or more dangerous and unsanitary, in my job I spend all day within about two feet of a giant six hundred degree oven that runs from open to close. There is a cranky can opener that has sent more than one employee to the emergency room with severe finger damage, and you damn well better believe everyone who works there has forgotten or stumbled and introduced a limb to the oven, particularly during the rush periods.
And I don't even work in a full service kitchen with the whole suite of implements that can get you hurt there, especially when working at speed.
The point is, we think of production work as somehow more noble than service industry, but lets be honest here, one of those segments has been dying for decades and the economy hasn't completely collapsed yet, I don't know that we could say the same for the other.
The problem is of course that no one thinks of those jobs, or really any job that doesn't require a degree if we are being honest, as worthy of compensation, people talk about strengthening unions, but many of those same people scoff at the idea of food service workers forming those unions, or call center employees, or receptionists, and so on. Unions have lost a lot of strength over the years for various reasons, but one of them is their own lack of penetration in the service industry.
Expanding and strengthening Unions is the one most effective thing that can be done to fix that problem. But it goes hand in hand with eliminating Right to Work laws. An example, at my current place of employment, which I mostly like, there is posted on the same wall as the minimum wage and FMLA laws a piece of paper that supposedly describes the chain of escalation for employee issues, you know, how an employee can contact higher levels to address grievances, this is admirable, though laughable when you consider that Right to Work laws mean the employee has very little leverage no matter what authority they speak with. But about midway through the posting it stops talking about that anyway, suddenly there are warnings about Unions, telling us not to sign anything from anyone who claims to represent a Union, suggesting that Unions exist only to take our money and get in between proper communication between employees and management.
It isn't explicitly stated, but anyone with half a brain who reads that knows what will happen if management finds out they have been trying to organize, and again, we have no recourse if they fire us, as long as they don't give a reason on any official paperwork the worst that will happen to them is they have to pay unemployment.
I am all but certain my work is not unique, I suspect if you work for any decent sized company and you look around on their bulletin boards or in the employee handbook you will find something similar.
So yeah, I feel like there are higher priorities than bringing manufacturing back to the USA, like, almost anything is higher priority than that. Plus, if we need more jobs, I hear our nations infrastructure is long overdue for an upgrade, from roads to trains to dams, we could use a fair bit of work there and that shit is gonna be pretty hard to automate.
The final thought I had on the above image is 7. Get big money out of politics.
I agree in principle, but I find it interesting that during the last couple presidential elections money has had less of an impact than you might think, one can, and I do, make a strong argument that the GOP clusterfuck of candidates that led to Trump being the nominee has a lot to do with the fact that individual billionaires thought they could buy the race and all ended up backing different candidates, none of home were willing to give up and who spent the entire time tearing apart the candidates backed by opposing billionaires, a united funding source behind, say, JEB! from the beginning might have drowned Trump out, but instead the GOP has the weakest candidate in recent memory and is looking at an electoral college drubbing the likes of which hasn't been seen since the Reagan years.
Still want big money out of politics, but it is fun to see how evil defeats itself sometimes.
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