 I'm Salvatore Bobonis, author of 16 for 16, a Progressive Agenda for a Better America. This book lays out a program of 16 progressive social policies that, if implemented, would make America a better country. First, jobs. America needs more jobs. If the private sector won't provide them, the public sector should. Governments at all levels, federal, state and local, should be hiring people to do jobs that we need done. First and foremost, rebuilding America's crumbling infrastructure. Report after report identifies hundreds of billions of dollars of urgent repairs that are needed to America's infrastructure. Let's get to work on that. And more than the physical infrastructure, let's also rebuild America's human infrastructure. We could put a teacher's aid in every public school classroom next school year. No reason to wait. And we should be supporting public education provided by and for the public. The whole idea of hiring a for-profit company to teach our children is, forgive me, idiotic. I don't know of a single rich county school district that has outsourced its education to a private provider. Well, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Speaking of the goose, every American over age 65 has health insurance. It's called Medicare. It works, and it's incredibly cheap considering the kinds of health burdens older people suffer with. Well, Obamacare is a good start, but it's not good enough. We need Medicare for everyone. And someone is going to have to pay for it. America needs higher taxes. And I'm not just saying higher taxes on the rich, I mean higher taxes on you. Good or not, everyone should be paying a larger share of taxes in order to provide a better level of government services. Now the people who have benefited most from recent tax cuts are the millionaire earners. People who are earning over $500,000 a year used to pay 30.4% to average income tax. 20 years later it was down to 22%. If you think that America has become an incredibly more vibrant place with a burgeoning economy as a result of tax cuts over the last 20 years, great. But if you think that 1990s America was doing better economically than 2010s America, then let's go back to the tax structure we had in the 1990s. We also have to make sure people can retire. I don't want the baby boomer generation to be the last one that experiences retirement. I want to retire too. And it's easy to refinance Social Security. Just make sure that everyone pays Social Security tax. Right now people pay Social Security tax on the first $118,000 they make and nothing on the rest. Well, if we simply extended Social Security tax to cover all income, not just low incomes, then we would have plenty of money to pay for Social Security and Medicare. You know who's piling up money? The banks. And they've been doing so since the global financial crisis. Because the Federal Reserve gives them money for free, well, now if we're a nominal interest rate of a fraction of a percent. When a bank can borrow at a fraction of a percent and then lend it back to us on our credit cards for 20%, well, that's a license to print money. We should take that license away from the banks, give it to ordinary people if we're going to give it to anyone. You've heard of the right to work? There's no such thing as a right to work. It's really a right to screw your union. Well, there's no such right in my dictionary. When workers in a workplace vote to form a union, everybody should have to pay the union dues. In so-called right to work states, those who want to pay their dues can pay them. Those who don't want to pay their dues don't have to. Making it in effect impossible for workers to form a union. Look, you can't just say I don't want to be part of my county so I'm not going to pay taxes to the county. You can't say I don't want to be part of my state so I'm not going to pay taxes to the state. Well, in the same way, you can't say, you know, I don't want to be part of this union so I don't want to pay taxes to the union. If the union is providing services for you and unions are by law obliged to provide services for all workers in a workplace, whether they're members or not, well, if the union has to provide services for you, you should have to pay for the union. Don't fight for 15. Fight for 1773. If you take the minimum wage from 1969 and update it for GDP growth for the last 40 years, 45 years, you get $17.73 an hour. What that means is that if minimum wages had risen in line with the rest of the economy, no more generous, no less generous, just rising with the economy as a whole, they would now be 1773. That's where they should be and they should be indexed for the future to GDP growth, not indexed to cost of living. Herman Cain had 999. I have 101010. 10 paid sick days, 10 paid holidays, 10 paid vacation days for everyone. It's just a no-brainer. Let me tell you a story about 101010. In Australia, a pleasant little continent in the southern hemisphere, they don't have 101010. They have 101020. 10 paid sick days, 10 paid holidays, 20 paid vacation days because in America, even if you get 10 vacation days, that means at Christmas you have to go visit your family. When do you get to take a vacation? In Australia, they get to visit their family and they get to take a vacation, 101020. If you want something even funnier, 100 years ago in Australia, you used to have to take a boat to go back to visit family in England, in Scotland, in Wales, in Ireland. The boat took four weeks to get to England and four weeks to come back to Australia. So what did they do? Every 10 years, you get another 10 weeks off, long service leave, they called it, so that once every 10 years you could go visit the family. Well now they fly to go visit the family, but they still get 10 weeks off every 10 years. Every person, ordinary people and ordinary jobs, a supermarket worker gets a sabbatical every 10 years. Number 11, put an end to the prison state. The land of the free should not be the land of the incarcerated. America has more prisoners per capita than Russia or China. Five times as many as other developed countries do. Five times as many as America itself did back in the 1950s and 1960s. There's no reason we have to keep such an enormous proportion of America's people and especially of African American men in jail. Now look, I know that abortion is a topic on which passions run very high and rightly so on both sides of the debate. All the more reason we need a single national abortion law. We need a law that defines when you can get an abortion. We need a law that defines under what circumstances a woman can get an abortion. It's ridiculous to think that a woman's right to an abortion depends on what county she happens to live in or what a doctor at her local hospital feels about abortion. We just need to standardize this once and for all and pass a national abortion law. Whatever law we pass, no one is going to be satisfied. But we need it all the same. Number 13, let people vote. Cities that try to deny people access to polling places or try to strike them off the voter rolls are, I mean that kind of dirty politics is undemocratic, you might even say, un-American. It's just wrong. Look, make election day a national holiday. More than that, make every store and every workplace close for eight hours from nine to five. You can live without groceries or gasoline for eight hours once a year for election day and get everybody into vote. We should be trying to get everyone to vote, not trying to prevent people from voting. Let people vote. Stop torturing. Stop assassinating. Close down the NSA. Human drug policies cause massive dislocation and violence in Mexico, Central America, parts of South America. When people come to America fleeing gang violence that has been created by our own policies, we can give them a break. When they're children, we have to give them a break. Because we're talking about children who are coming to America to live with family who are willing to take them in and the government is deporting them in order to meet some kind of immigration pledge. Well, suffer the little children to come to America. And finally, we have to save the earth. Every summer, America defeats invading aliens from outer space or super bugs that are turning people into zombies. Well, if America can defeat all of the challenges of a comic book apocalypse, America can defeat global warming. And America is the only country that can do it. Look, the scientists say that by the end of the century, temperatures are likely to rise by 10 degrees Fahrenheit on average around the world, by 2100, and then the projections stop there. No one is even trying to guess what might happen in 2200 or 2500 or the year 3000. Well, I don't know about you, but I hope humanity is still around in the year and I don't want the average temperature on the earth to be 3000 degrees Fahrenheit. We have to stop global warming and only America has the power, the influence and the authority to make that happen. Together, these 16 policies form an agenda for a better America. There are other progressive policies that you might want. There are certainly other good causes that we should take on, but I want to ask you, if we adopted all 16 of these policies, would America be a better place? If the answer is yes, then let's get it done. And if you want the evidence for why these 16 policies are necessary and how I know they will work, buy the book. Thank you.