To
President Barack Obama
From
The American People
CITIZEN’S
B R I E F I N G B O O K
2
Note from the Transition:
As a closing act for the Transition, Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett requested that
the O!ce of Public Liaison create a process by which Americans outside of
Washington could come together to present ideas directly to the President – a
“Citizen’s Briefing Book.”
The idea was to use the Transition website, change.gov, to create a grassroots
version of the research binders that presidents receive every day. But instead of
advice from top government o!cials, the Citizen’s Briefing Book is composed of
ideas submitted by ordinary people and reflecting the enthusiastic engagement
from the public we saw throughout the course of Change.gov.
125,000 users submitted over 44,000 ideas and cast over 1.4 million votes, with
the most popular ideas accumulating tens of thousands of votes each. This book
contains some of the top ideas, broken into groups by issue area. You can tell how
popular each idea was by looking at the number next to it – it represents how
many people voted for the idea, with 10 points awarded for each positive vote. In
addition, you will find a “word cloud” for each category of ideas representing the
frequency with which various words and concepts appeared through the entire
process.
Out of the tens of thousands of submissions, these ideas found the most support;
here they are, unvarnished and unedited.
3
Contents
Economy .......................................................................................................................................................... 6
Ƙȿ Revoke the George W. Bush tax cuts for the top 1 %, 57080 points ...........................................................6
Ƙȿ Let’s make reduced-scale farming profitable! Less dependence on imported foods! 42070 points ........6
Ƙȿ Reform the IRS and Stop the Tax Loopholes, 32840 points .........................................................................7
Ƙȿ Encourage Trade Schools, 32150 p