Politically-minded students at UW-Milwaukee list a range of issues they want the next U.S. president to address, but few seem to link directly to the young people's immediate futures.
Republican Kyle Beesley wants the country to lower its corporate taxes.
"Right now, we have the highest corporate tax in many, many countries. We’re driving businesses to leave. Burger King, for instance, they’re moving to Canada now. If we lowered our corporate tax rate, we would be able to keep a lot more businesses from leaving the United States,” Beesley says.
Fellow Republican student Devin Gatton is also thinking about taxes. He’d like the next president to propel the country toward adopting a flat tax.
“You could even have it as a progressive flat tax so that people that are further to the left can still say, hey, the rich are still paying their quote on quote fair share. It would allow for growth, it would expand the base, and it would also allow lower tax rates dramatically from where we are. Of course for that to work we need to make sure deductions are taken out. We can’t have any deductions, except for very specific ones,” Gatton says.
UWM student Garit Schmidt, who identifies as Libertarian, wants the next president to lead the country in backing off from regulation and surveillance of Americans. Schmidt says he doesn’t like what he’s heard about the National Security Administration scanning information.
“Privacy to me is just sort of an absolute, you know, it’s a constitutional violation that the government is able to look into our private phone calls, emails, text messages,” Schmidt says.
Over on the Democratic side, student Sam Rumack echoes what many in the party want in their next president.
“We probably need to start raising the minimum wage. People need to buy into Obamacare because the idea is that if everyone works together on it, it works perfectly,” Rumack says.
It appears that in the end, not every party or voter may be entirely satisfied.