My stump speech
America, let’s capitalize on our strengths.
We’re good at doing new things. We’re willing to change. We recognize when change needs changing.
But know how to fold the right way. Don’t quit the game. Get a new deal.
Take the Affordable Care Act. A big new thing. It didn’t get everyone covered, didn’t push rates down. I know, that’s because it was attacked, drawn and quartered, by Republican states, by a Republican president.
But the ACA needs to change, needs a new deal. So that partisans aren’t able to destroy it.
That doesn’t mean walking away from the table. The ACA was like getting a 6 and an 8, in blackjack. You don’t fold. You get more cards.
Medicaid expansion was paid for by the federal government. But because Medicaid is state run, states can prevent it. But if the federal government pays for the expansion, it can call it something else, and set different rules.
Call it Mediwork, since its for working people who don’t have health care and can’t afford insurance. Medicare doesn’t give states the option of “opting out”. Neither should Mediwork.
Insurance companies said they wouldn’t play nice if there was a public option, a Medicare option along with private insurance in the ACA marketplace. Insurance companies didn’t play nice in any case. The ACA needs a medicare option in the marketplace.
Don’t call it medicare. Call it public option. It will be medicare paid for by users.
Most importantly, insurance premiums rise slowly over the lifespan, until 52 or 54, when they spike. That’s when people can’t afford private plans. That’s the burden younger people subsidize in the ACA.
Expand Medicare down to 52 or 54. Couple that with an increase in the age of Social Security to 67. That will offset costs. Although they are separate in the government, they both come out of people’s paychecks. It makes plenty of sense.
By expanding Medicare to high cost age groups, the rest of the population’s premiums will drop. Nothing else has such a bang for the buck.
The ACA is a good start. It dealt a good hand, not a great one. Anyone who expects great cards the first deal is naive. It’s time to pick the cards that don’t work, and get new ones. Mediwork, a public option, and Medicare at 53, will reduce premiums and improve Americans’ health.
Medicare for all is like walking away from the table. 20% of all Americans work in health care. They’re not walking away. You won’t find another table where you can get a great deal first time round.
We have to deal with what we’re dealt, not just trust in new deals.
Which leads me to the Green New Deal.
We need to stop global warming. The climate is always changing. What’s happening now is that it’s changing in one direction — it’s getting hotter. And that’s not good.
America, we invent things. People say it’s impossible, and we show them they’re wrong.
We need to invent ways to remove carbon from coal burning smokestacks. Not sexy. They say it’s difficult. I say that’s what America does. It’ll take research in membrane technology, in metamaterials, in chemistry.
The best place to do this research is in coal country. Fund education in Kentucky and West Virginia, fund universities there in big ways to get carbon out of coal smoke and into storage. Set ambitious goals.
They want coal. Then let them step up and invent what needs to be invented, develop what needs to be developed, put in place what needs to put in place. Give them the resources and set the goals high.
The Green New Deal. Its all about renewables. Renewables are sexy. They won’t work on their own.
You need to store energy, not just generate it. Renewables generate electricity. Batteries store it. Batteries suck.
Back in the 1970s, batteries could store some energy. Today they store maybe twice as much. Compare that to other technology. In the 1970s, big mainframe computers could process as much information as what your cellphone does today. Computer processors are hundreds of times more powerful.
Right now, your electric car, your Leaf or Tesla, have big expensive batteries that can go 200 or 300 miles. Then you need to plug them in, maybe for hours. OK for commuting 20 miles to work.
If car batteries held a charge that let you drive 2,000 miles, it would be game over. The oil companies might do something drastic, like offer people free gasoline. It won’t work.
A 2,000 mile battery is 10 times better than today’s. That’s the kind of change we do in technology. Wireless bandwidth increased that much in a few years. The first genome cost $2.7 billion to sequence. Today it costs $100 dollars. One hundred years ago astronomers said the universe was a 20 or 30 thousand light years across. The Hubble space telescope can see 10 billion light years away, and there’s more. That’s 50 times bigger.
If we want renewables to take over, we need batteries to join the march of technology. The same ideas are used today as 50 years ago. We need creative thinkers to get into engineering batteries.
That needs public funding, even if it’s opposed every step of the way by fossil fuel interests. Big funding, education funding, research funding. We can do this. Americans can make the battery that goes 2,000 miles.
Americans are creative. Let other countries double-down on existing technology. We come up with the breakthroughs.
Mafic rocks, very alkaline stone, captures carbon and sequester it. Research and invent.
But we won’t stop global warming at once, or in time to prevent serious consequences, even if everything stopped right now. CO2 stays in the atmosphere for 50 years, then slowly cycles out over hundreds. What’s there is going to heat up even more.
There’s a lot of creatures on this planet that are going extinct right now. Because it’s getting warmer. They don’t vote. But they count. That’s on our watch. Whether or not we curb emissions.
Parts of the south pole, Antarctica, are getting weak. They could collapse into the ocean. In less than a year, sea levels could rise several feet. Scientists are down there, listening. They’ll warn us.
Most Americans, and most people in every country, live near the water. Most of the trillions of dollars of infrastructure in the world, and in America, are near the water. Billions of people, trillions of dollars, threatened by global warming.
There’s around 20 countries that could easily spread reflective particles in the stratosphere, which is the thin atmosphere before space. That will lower the earth’s temperature by 3 or 4 degrees Fahrenheit. Probably stop the Antarctice ice shelf from dropping in the ocean.
At least one country will do it. Remember, billions of people, trillions of dollars at risk. They’ll demand their government does something.
Since we know this will happen, let’s do it the right way. Stratospheric geoengineering. We’re doing very little preparation. We need a diplomatic forum that brings countries together. We need to voice concerns. We need research. We need a treaty. We need to act.
Some people say technology caused this problem, so it can’t solve it. Technology solves problems, and causes others. If you don’t think it solves more than it causes, then you should become an engineer and improve things. But if you think Americans, or any other group of people, are going to return to pre-technology lifestyle, I say one word: fool.
Government needs to direct and fund research, which starts with public education. It needs to slow down global warming, because our next generation needs time to fix things. Solar geoengineering will help slow things down so they can do the job. It doesn’t solve the problem, but helps manage it.
Education isn’t just for kids and scientists. American changes and people get displaced by change. For too long we’ve paid lip service to retraining and adult education. Too often unions discount it, because they want to protect jobs. I understand that. But it’s time to face facts. Manufacturing will return to these shores, it is already. But it’s automated. Remember, technology keeps improving.
So do people. People keep learning at any age. It’s common to hear folks say you can only learn a new language fast when you’re a child. The military knows that’s not true. The only advantage a child has, before around 12 years old, is the accent. In fact, given the same amount of time spent learning, adults learn a language faster.
We can revolutionize adult training and learning, because there’s no special interests or big institutions involved. This is something Americans can do. We reinvent ourselves. We know how. Put our shoulder into the effort.
Know when to hold your cards, when to get dealt another, when to fold, know when you have a full-house. We have a pretty good hand with the ACA, but we need some new cards too. We can’t just fold all our fossil fuel cards, we need to clean ’em up. Our renewables won’t win, unless we get a new battery dealt.
All of it needs learning. Government must step up to find better ways to learn, we’ve got to fund it at all ages. We won’t have a deck to deal from without it.
Of course government needs resources to fund things. The Trump tax cuts must be rescinded. Keep a lower tax on corporations, but get rid of tax loop holes. The only way that happens is if the President and congressional leaders meet in private, outside the view of lobbyists. That’s how you hammer out a deal that hurts campaign donors.
That’s my campaign speech. At least what I thought of this Sunday morning.
