Dear Mr. Trump, About Your 29 Ideas

Regarding your 29 proposals, here’s a bit more than just the ranking you asked for. I’ll start with the best:

7. Announce our official withdrawal from the TPP.

That’s my favorite. Wonderful! We don’t need any more trade agreements that empower corporations over governments and impose unpopular laws on people. Good riddance! Don’t replace it with something worse, please!

8. Renegotiate NAFTA into terms that protect the American worker.

This could be a great one. I’m not clear why you wouldn’t just tear up the treaty you’ve repeatedly called one of the worst treaties in history. You could negotiate bilateral agreements with other nations. There’s no actual need for NAFTA. But if you’re going to first try to renegotiate it, the U.S. worker needs the right to organize, among other rights. The workers of Canada and Mexico need to be considered. As does the natural environment that we and our kids all have to live in.

5. Introduce an infrastructure package to modernize our country.

This, too, could be terrific. Or it could be disastrous. Modernized countries have fast electric trains, solar and wind energy, pedestrian and bicycle paths, electric car chargers, sustainable agriculture, free hospitals for all human beings, and architecture that leans more toward the beautiful than the monumental. We could use more schools and parks, more farmers’ markets, more urban gardens, and more places to vote. All of these dreams and much more could be easily achieved, even while radically boosting foreign aid, if the U.S. were to either cut military spending or tax billionaires or both. But you want to increase military spending and cut taxes on billionaires. Even if your idea of modernized infrastructure is coal mines and oil wells and highways, you have no way to pay for it — thank goodness. And don’t forget: the people who voted for you are obsessed with the debt, so don’t even try that route.

20. Enact a five-year ban on White House and congressional officials becoming lobbyists after they leave government service.

This is good, as far as it goes. Why not 10 years both before and after? And why just lobbyists? Why not anyone profiting financially from a sector governed by the relevant government position? And why just the White House and Congress? Why not all government departments and agencies? Putting an oil profiteer in charge of the EPA is not solved by the fact that the EPA isn’t in the White House.

25. Reform the Department of Veterans Affairs in order to provide proper treatment to America’s forgotten heroes.

This sounds good, if you actually mean it. But let’s not call them heroes. Let’s call them brave people who were abused by some of those recent wars you properly denounced during the campaign — though you supported them when it mattered most.

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