Some Policies my Ideal 2020 Candidate Would Pursue

My ideal candidate would take the following positions on these issues.

Economics

• Make it easy for entrepreneurs to succeed.
• incubators in communities the way earlier generations planted libraries and universities as just one of the many support structures to put in place to make more citizens more entrepreneurial. Do all we can to make citizens wildly successful and then tax the ones who achieve success at high rates (say, marginal tax rates double that of middle class) to pay for investing in the next round of new entrepreneurs.
• Make a huge investment in research

• We will spend about $3.5 billion on DARPA - Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - this year. DARPA has helped to fund amazing technologies that helped birth modern computers, smart phones and satellites. We are still counting the trillions in returns on early investments of millions and billions in DARPA. I would match the DoD's R-and-D spending with similar levels of spending on Department of Education, Department of Energy, etc. to something like the table above. This would not only employ a growing number of doctoral graduates (we could conservatively assume about 140,000 new jobs for staff and leading researchers with the numbers above) but would lead to returns of trillions in the future as we solve problems of energy, commute times, poverty, environment, etc. Entrepreneurs can translate this research into development, creating new wealth and jobs in the process of deploying new processes, services and products that build on this research.
• Make it easy for employees to use corporations as tools for creating wealth
• Laws requiring mechanisms inside of corporations that allow employees to create wealth through innovation and entrepreneurship and dictating that between 0.5% to 2% of that corporation's employees are paid more than the CEO as a result.
• Tax inheritance more than capital gains more than income
• Massive spending on research on alternative energy, upgrading infrastructure to reduce carbon emissions and the introduction of carbon tax. Innovate our way out of a fossil fuel economy.

Social policy

• Make it easy for single moms to succeed
• Make high-quality childcare free
• Sex is one of the most wonderful acts and rape is one of the worst. The main difference is consent. Pregnancy and childbirth is one of the most wonderful acts ... unless it is forced on you by others, in which case it is one of the worst. It should be the choice of individual women about whether and when to have sex or babies, not the choice of the men in their community. 
• Annually - and aggressively - reduce childhood poverty
• Provide universal healthcare
• This would include death panels and other criteria about what level of care we have a right to and what level of care the community should not be billed for.
• Transform K-16 into an education system that creates a common sense of community but a wildly diverse workforce that includes the knowledge workers that are the primary focus of schools today AND trades, entrepreneurs, makers, government and service workers and other emerging career paths

Communications

• Treat investigative reporting like research. That is, it should be funded by the government with oversight of the agenda by citizen boards. (We should more aggressively follow the example of the BBC.)
• People whose data is key to the success of a social platform (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, etc.) should receive a portion of that platform's revenue (idea taken from Andrew Yang).

Trump's Most Baffling Policy (Or, yet another chapter in Trump's on-going battle with the future)

We beat the Nazis because we had better manufacturing and research capacity. We invented the atom bomb before they did. We made tanks and planes faster than they could.

Near the end of the war, FDR asked Vannevar Bush to explore how wartime research efforts could be transformed into peace time efforts to create new technologies and jobs and to increase life expectancy. Out of Bush's recommendations, captured in Science, the Endless Frontier, came the National Science Foundation which has steadily grown since, providing funding for the basic research that is life-changing over generations.

Bush had great insight into the importance of research and how it is best conducted. Speaking of basic research that doesn't immediately translate into a new product, he wrote about how medical research could be supported within medical schools and universities.

Apart from teaching, however, the primary obligation of the medical schools and universities is to continue the traditional function of such institutions, namely, to provide the individual worker with an opportunity for free, untrammeled study of nature, in the directions and by the methods suggested by his interests, curiosity, and imagination. The history of medical science teaches clearly the supreme importance of affording the prepared mind complete freedom for the exercise of initiative. 

As the United States acted on recommendations such as Bush's, our country clearly took the lead in the creation of new technology, industries and companies. The National Science Foundation is both reality and symbol of our on-going support for research. Bush saw in research the basis for our economic progress as well: 

Where will these new products come from? How will we find ways to make better products at lower cost? The answer is clear. There must be a stream of new scientific knowledge to turn the wheels of private and public enterprise. There must be plenty of men and women trained in science and technology for upon them depend both the creation of new knowledge and its application to practical purposes.

As it turns out, support for research is non-partisan. Since its creation, leaders of both parties have steadily increased the amounts they've asked for to fund the National Science Foundation. Until now.

Trump is the first president to cut average funding from his predecessor. (Or more precisely, request that the average be lowered during his administration. Presidents make a request and Congress makes the appropriation.) Add to his list of leadership qualities, "Not a fan of scientific progress. Facts? I don't need research for that. I can make those up."

Among the institutions he's trying to erode is this most basic tool for progress. His desire to cut even research funding might be the most baffling of his attempts to retreat from the modern world.

Basic research matters. We rightfully pay attention to the Fed's policy when it comes to setting interest rates because that can change investment and spending. The National Science Foundation doesn't just affect investment but actually is an investment in intellectual capital, which is the basis for new technologies, industries, companies, jobs, and wealth. Research takes longer to work than interest rates, but has a bigger effect. I would argue that a slowdown in research funding results in a slowdown in productivity and wage growth. But of course something with a 20-year lag struggles to get much attention in this world of 20-second attention spans.

The amount we fund the National Science Foundation seems paltry to me. Even at its peak, it never even hit even one-tenth of one percent of GDP and it has averaged 4/100th of one percent of GDP in its lifetime. It seems to me that we could hardly err by making it larger each year. Much larger. But alas, the man who looks at our economy and concludes that the rich are not rich enough and the poor are not poor enough has also decided that we know quite enough already. That hardly seems the case to me. 

What Government Does Well: Basic, Market Changing Research

There is a fascinating book review by Jeff Madrick that undermines so many of the casually inaccurate claims made by libertarians in the course of exploring The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths by Mariana Mazzucato and Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Markets, Speculation and the State by William H. Janeway.

These titles buttress my suspicion that to be a libertarian requires a special blend of intelligence and naivete. Specifically, a naivete about the history of government's role in economic progress to date. These authors argue that economies move forward on a dance between government innovation (usually for basic research) and private innovation (usually for products that apply these innovations).

"Government can't do anything well," libertarians say. They've said it so much that it begins to sound like truth, in the same way that the Greeks' repetition of Homer's myths made Athena seem real. But what are the facts?

Despite protestations that government should not pick winners or losers, even including Solyndra it's only about 2% of the projects partly financed by government that go bankrupt. Symantec and Qualcomm were among the new companies funded by The Small Business Innovation Research program - a program started by Ronald Reagan. Google's basic algorithm was funded with a National Science Foundation grant. The iPod - and essentially every computing device - depends on technology that came out of US and European government-funded research labs.

It seems silly to say that the government should not choose research projects or companies or industries to invest in. The government - in the form of universities - regularly chooses which kids to invest in for undergraduate and graduate studies. The government chooses who goes to prison and who goes free. The government chooses who pays taxes and who gets subsidies. Governments inescapably make big decisions.

The real criticism of government is that they're likely to invest in projects, technologies and even companies that the market would not finance. I think this is accurate. I also think that such an accusation is actually an argument for such investment. Taking the lead on research can give a country an advantage for decades (look, for instance, at what the spending on computer chip and Internet research did for the US). Better to spend on 10 technologies, only a couple of which change the economy, than to spend on no technologies and watch another country take the lead on an important new industry or technology.

Yet because of recent cuts, funding for government research programs is at its lowest rate - as a percentage of GDP - in 40 years. Back to the level it was at before the personal computer, the Internet, bio-tech, and nanotech. (All, by the way, products of basic research initially funded by government programs.)

We're about to enter a period of even more rapid technological and economic change, not less. We can listen to the historically naive and continue to cut our funding on basic research. Or we can assume that even with all the change we're living through,the one thing that hasn't changed is that investment now determines income later, and in no area does that investment have more potential than basic research or even subsidies to startups.