I think the creation of a national medical service, which would see that rural and blighted urban areas have adequate medical and dental coverage is a good place to start. The government agrees to pay your way through medical, dental, or nursing school, in exchange for your agreement to spend a certain number of years helping to provide care in areas with little or no medical coverage. The number of years would be dependent on your specialty: a general practitioner is going to have to spend less time in service than a heart surgeon.
Such a system could be applied to other fields as a system to promote acquiring a college education without leaving people mired in debt. (Senator Bernie Sanders is already talking about such a system.) Money should be the last thing to prevent a person with talent from getting the education they need to make full use of that talent. Europe and Japan are far ahead of us in terms of the numbers of engineers and scientists graduated, because they provide a college education as a right.
Finally, we must encourage a return of manufacturing to our shores. A nation's wealth is dependent upon those things it physically produces, not the services it provides. We must return to the trade policies of Alexander Hamilton, and quit shipping our manufacturing overseas in the quest for additional profit. We have only to look at what happened to Great Britain in the Twentieth Century to see our future if drastic measures are not taken.
This future is dependent on our ability to educate our citizens in all of the subjects that are required for our nation to prosper. With education available to all, we can someday realize Thomas Jefferson's dream that, "The less wealthy people,...by the bill for a general education, would be qualified to understand their rights, to maintain them, and to exercise with intelligence their parts in self-government; and all this would be effected without the violation of a single natural right of any one individual citizen."--Autobiography, 1821; The Complete Works of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition; volume 1, page 73; (1904).
