Americans need jobs. The democrats want to soak the rich (I agree that, we probably should pay more anyhow), create a comprehensive social safety net, broadly

Americans need jobs. 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. The republicans seem very concerned with collective security, 'judicial overreach' (any policy they don't like from a judge), and smaller government - this mostly seems to manifest itself as a firm 'no' to any proposed solution from the democrats. Neither of them (at least at a national level) is focusing on what I see as the elephants in the room: 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'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's. If you look in third and fourth tier cities, you see similar trends. 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'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. Neither party is really speaking to this, they broadly don'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.