Let me comment on some of those points after reading through the blog post kindly submitted here.

"Issue #1: Teach Programming at an Early Age

. . . .

"Ask any programmer how old they were when they first started coding. A survey done on that very question shows that programmers who were still coding well into their thirties started learning, on average, at age 13 with a standard deviation of about 5 years, which is a window from age 8 to 18."

More interesting than asking current programmers at what age they started programming would be asking them whether they first learned to enjoy programming and to become good at it because of school lessons, or despite school lessons. Comments on that issue from working programmers would be very interesting to me here.

"Therefore, I believe we need to require all Middle School students to take a course that equips them with a basic understanding of computers and computer programs."

I took a unit in BASIC programming on a time-sharing terminal as part of my eighth grade mathematics class during the Baby Boom generation. That didn't turn me into a programmer. Some of my high school classmates who did turn into programmers endured our high school's optional course on computers (as I also did), but they actually learned their programming by doing what they felt like on the PLATO time-sharing terminal at our public library, by playing around with their early Hewlett Packard electronic calculators, and as they became college students by building their own microcomputers before those were a commercially available product. My oldest son, who is currently a software engineer at a startup in New York City (yeah, they have their electricity back now) learned to program in a joint class arranged by our homeschooling support group, with voluntary attendance, through some voluntary distance-learning courses, and through a lot of building his own projects on GitHub while taking computer science classes through dual enrollment at our state flagship university while of high school age.

"An early start program like this would ensure that everyone gets a taste of what it's like to code, giving us a greater opportunity to inspire more kids to become developers."

Mandatory school courses in MANY subjects frequently have little or nothing to do with what actual practitioners do with the same subject in the free-enterprise workplace. It would be an interesting issue to study empirically, but for all the evidence I have seen, mandatory school courses can do as much to turn pupils off to subjects as they do to spark learner interest.

"Issue #6: Refactoring Congress and Agencies

"If Congress were a software product, customers would have abandoned it long ago. If I am elected president, I intend to bring a set of fresh eyes to every little process in congress, the executive branch, and our many government agencies."

Translated into English, what he is saying is that he is going to violate the separation of powers among three branches of federal government that is built into the United States Constitution. And Congress will succeed in blocking him from doing that--with my full support. I don't want a dictator in the United States, and I'm more worried about a President who becomes a dictator with no checks and balances than I am about an inefficient Congress. (Indeed, I cherish the saying of a wise friend of mine who said, in a conversation about politics with a mathematics teacher and me, "I'm an engineer. The last thing I want is EFFICIENT government.") On the other hand, to give this point its due, if he would like to do more private-sector contracting to deliver services of the executive branch that the President leads, I'm happy to see him do competitive contracting to the full extent allowed by law, and to use the bully pulpit of the presidency to persuade Congress to pass more laws that would allow more flexibility in management of executive branch agencies.

"Issue #8: Space

"Developers care about space. Maybe it has something to do with an appreciation for inspiring innovation in the fields of engineering,"

but more likely it has more to do with most developers reading more science fiction novels than they read books about history and current events. I'm a child of the Space Age, and I liked nothing better in my youth than watching TV news reports about space missions and reading continually books (fiction and nonfiction) about all aspects of space exploration. But the cruel expense of boosting materials out of earth's gravity well even into near-earth orbit has convinced me, once I grew up and learned economics, that manned space exploration (particularly) is a huge waste of money, and even unmanned space exploration (which I support in general, for instance by putting photographs of Mars on my computer as my desktop wallpaper) needs to be very carefully managed not to become a money pit. I agree with Neil deGrasse Tyson that there is a rapturous sense of wonder derived from exploring space that expands our imaginations, and that basic science research in general is very important, but it is easy to spend too much on the space program, which was certainly done by the space shuttle program and arguably by the Apollo program. There are a lot of exciting and stimulating basic science problems to solve right here on earth.

As Winston Churchill said, "Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."