Publius has been in business for forty years and knows a thing or two about what governments must do to ensure economic growth and a strong jobs market in an advanced economy. For business to prosper, the state must guarantee us four things.

First, the state must guarantee us that we can move our goods more efficiently than any competing nation.

Second, the state must guarantee us that we can move our information more efficiently than any competing nation.

Third, the state must guarantee us that our labor force is the healthiest in the world.

Fourth, the state must guarantee us that our labor force is the best educated in the world.

It doesn’t matter where you stand on the political spectrum. If the state cannot meet these requirements business has no future and nor, therefore, does the nation. Every time you hit a pothole in New York City or hear Marco Rubio refer to “a President that..”you know how well this is working in our country today.

It also doesn’t matter how the guarantees are met. Charter schools? Vouchers? Public schools? Who cares? Just bring us the results when we hire people. The same thing holds with healthcare. We want results! Obamacare, Romneycare, who cares?

The largest container ship in the world can no longer visit the west coast because our ports are too antiquated to handle it. Ok, so how do we fix this? And how fast?

What staggers Publius is that in the current election cycle, with the economy only slowly recovering from the Crash of ’08 and competitors hitting us hard and fast, not one of the twenty or so presidential candidates from the GOP, Tea Party or Democratic Party said a word about meeting the 4Gs. Not a single word.

Of the two remaining candidates, Don Trump shouts inanities and Twitters himself to death while Hilary Clinton blathers pieties. Very helpful.

The only thing Publius can conclude is that Trump and Clinton either don’t know anything about business and wealth creation or don’t care. As far as the future of the country is concerned it doesn’t matter which. We lose big time either way.

Publius’ challenge to the candidates. You’ve seen the 4Gs. Now step up to the plate. Bet you can’t do it. Bet you don’t know how.

Follow Up

July 24, 2016

As Publius predicted, Trump couldn't do it. Don Trump did not mention even one of the Four Guarantees in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention in Cleveland. In other words, we wasted our time. Thanks a lot Don.

August 1, 2017

The three party Trumpista coalition in Congress has failed us on Guarantee Three: to compete, our labor force must be the healthiest in the world.

To understand how dumb these people are, check this out. Canadians pay 51% less than we do and live three years longer. That’s amazing price-performance! We just get the price …

Our health care expenses have grown 2.1X as fast as Canada's over the last twenty years. Yet, for the last forty years our life expectancy has been falling ever farther behind theirs.

Canadian price-performance says that we are blowing an extra $1.3 trillion every year--a number that gets higher every year--only so we can have ever shorter lives than our northern neighbors. Say again?

That's 2.2X our military budget!! 2.4X our total Medicaid spending!! And 2X what we spend on Medicare. We can cut every cent that we spend on Medicaid and Medicare and still have $190 billion left to cut to beat the Canadians.

We are hosers, eh.

#TheFourGuarantees #Trump