Americans need jobs.<p>The democrats want to soak the rich (I agree that, we probably should pay more anyhow), create a comprehensive social safety net, broadly have a larger role for government in individuals lives.<p>The republicans seem very concerned with collective security, &#x27;judicial overreach&#x27; (any policy they don&#x27;t like from a judge), and smaller government - this mostly seems to manifest itself as a firm &#x27;no&#x27; to any proposed solution from the democrats.<p>Neither of them (at least at a national level) is focusing on what I see as the elephants in the room:<p>1. Broad swaths of the country that were prosperous 20 years ago are now not - and enormous areas that were busy 40 years ago are now dead wastelands. If you go out to a rural area, you&#x27;ll see this, go on a road trip, go thru small towns, the only new buildings (built after ~1974 or so) are usually government or at funded by outside capital, (like McDonalds, or a Wal*Mart) sure, the college towns and county seats are often somewhat prosperous, but not like they were even in the 80&#x27;s. If you look in third and fourth tier cities, you see similar trends.<p>2. In either place, rural or urban, its also very very hard for the young to find a good job, with or without a college degree - this has a multitude of causes - from we&#x27;re teaching our youth the wrong things, to companies expecting inexperienced workers to come magically all trained up for the job - this topic alone is a couple thousand words - just suffice it to say, something is wrong.<p>Neither party is really speaking to this, they broadly don&#x27;t see outside the beltway - I blame free trade, one size fits all regulation, and excessive defense spending (instead of say, infrastructure) for this malaise - I believe very strongly unless we fix these problems, they will come to breach the very foundations of our republic and we may end up with a much worse system than we have now.