I am an Independent and have voted for Democrats, Republicans, Independents and members of various third party movements over the past forty years.

But I said all of that in the original article

Like I said in the beginning, I am an Independent, but that does not mean that I do not have strong convictions on the political issues of the day.  And here are a few more of those issues from an independent’s view for discussion.

There is nothing more frustrating to the average American citizen than the agonizingly slow recovery of the economy and the more or less steady unemployment level near 8% after several years of higher unemployment rates.  One side says we are moving in the right direction and the other side says we are not moving at all and will soon get worse.

In my view, the only way to fix the private sector, strengthen the middle class and revitalize a manufacturing base in the U.S. is for the private sector to fix itself. 

That being said, there is room for and need for some assistance from the government to make that happen.  Everyone that I have talked to, regardless of political leaning, agrees that the U.S. infrastructure (hard and soft) needs to be rebuilt, extended, refurbished or recreated. 

This will entail projects of enormous magnitude that the government can contract in pieces to the private sector, putting millions of Americans back to work in good paying jobs for years to come.   Everyone is happy – the middle class is working again, unemployment is low, the infrastructure is being repaired and more citizens and companies are making and spending money and everyone is paying more taxes.

Additional, efforts by the government in the area of tightening trade agreements to protect rather than victimize the American worker will once again make it cost effective to make and build things in the U.S. by forcing our trade partners to really provide a level playing field for American companies to export U.S. made products to their markets.

This will involve business regulations, corporate tax code revisions and trade agreement revisions with all of our trading partners and these are things that can be done in a matter of months not years if people put their minds and efforts to the task.

I also think that that reforms and improvements to our education system are necessary if the economy is truly to recover for the long term and the coming generations.  We need to create trade schools (high school and post secondary) to prepare the middle class of the future for highly technical blue collar jobs in a variety of industries.

Not every job requires a college degree and not all people are desirous of spending four years in college, technical education is the key to filling the high paying middle class jobs of the future.

The corporate tax code must be reformed.  Lower corporate tax rates, along with the elimination of all subsidies, loopholes and “special interest” deductions will actually increase the amount of taxes paid by corporations and spread the tax burden to all businesses in the U.S as well as being more competitive to corporate tax rates in other countries.

These are things that everyone seems to agree on but no one wants to work with the other side to get done which is the most frustrating thing to me

Thanks to www.act.mtv.com   for the graphic