Mostly good stuff. I don't think I'd merge house and Senate. Some of them need more constraint, like I'd legalize prostitution, but only if it's regulated like restaurants (health inspectors, workers rights, etc.).
What is your solution the massively disproportionate representation in the senate then? There are currently around 66.7 Californians for every Wyomingite. Do you think Wyomingites deserve 66.7 times the representation in the Senate? And yes, legalization would occur with reasonable regulations which would make sure the industry is safer for all those involved. I tried to keep the list as concise as possible for each issue reformed.
Do you think wyoming deserves to be a state? Every state gets the same representation in the Senate and I think that's fair. I don't think it's fair that the proportional side of the legislature isn't proportional anymore, though, and fixing that goes a very long way.
Because state legislatures should continue to exist. If less populated conservative states want to go down a rabbit hole of far right shit then let them. Just don't give them 2 senators per state to gridlock the states that continue to produce and provide for their population.
The Senate isn't intended to be a representative body, it's just two per state. They aren't doing things like setting funding/budgets. Congress (the house of representatives) is designed to do that, though that needs some tweaking.
The Senate isn’t intended to be a representative body
Both the house and senate vote to pass bills. The disproportionate population increases have led to less representation of citizens in more populated states.
But the original states didn't have balanced populations, the founders knew that, but they still set it to be two senators per state. The house is scaled by population.
They did that for as part of a negotiation though. The less populous states refused to join the union without something like the Senate.
To me it's an outdated concept because states are much less independent now than they were back then. And we have a national identity that didn't exist during the revolution.
There are other proposals to solve the Senate's disproportionate nature, such as apportioning Senate seats by state population. Most proposals I've seen for that would leave the Senate with a little more than a hundred seats (with a minimum of 1 seat per state), which would (mostly) solve the problem and make it closer to the house in terms of proportionality. Of course, it all depends on the exact implementation.
That is in fact the point. It's about checks and balances to stop bad actors from completely changing all of the rules the moment their party is in power. Of course, that's completely pointless in a 2 Party system anyways and we should really reform campaign finance and election laws surrounding how to get on the ballot.
The point of the Senate is that it's a more deliberative body, representing larger numbers of people, which serves to moderate the power of the House. Mind you, Congress as a whole was more powerful when the nation was founded; they've handed off power to the executive over the years, for better or worse (really, a bit of both). The House was also intended to grow with the population, and if we'd followed the general guidelines for growth the Founders suggested, we'd have a House with more than 600 members. The number of seats was capped ~90 years ago, because Congress didn't want to fund another renovation of the capitol building to fit more people. Also keep in mind that the States had a more uniform population distribution when the country was founded. You didn't have California and Nebraska sitting with orders of magnitude of difference between them, so the difference in representation in the Senate was not nearly as significant as it is today.
Wether we need a secondary deliberative body in the legislature or not is a matter of debate and opinion. I can see why you'd want one, but I can also understand why people would think it's not useful anymore.
There's no solution needed, since there isn't a problem to begin with. Individuals (should) have proportional representation in the House, and states have proportional representation in the Senate, which is how it should be.
Do you think Wyomingites deserve 66.7 times the representation in the Senate?
To be fair, Congress wouldn't be so inept if it weren't for the filibuster, which was never intended to be abused the way it is now. I'd be somewhat ok with the Senate if filibusters only required a simple majority to break again.
Beyond what you've stated about the disproportionate nature of the Senate, what exact legislative problems are you attributing to the existence of the Senate, and its disproportionate nature? And why do you think a purely proportional body will solve said issues? I'm also curious what you believe the purpose of the Senate, or a bicameral legislature in general, is.
I'm not trying to be accusatory in my probing, I'm simply curious what your exact rationale is ☺️.
The senate exists to maintain an artificial balance and make sure that only the approved things are actually voted on. That is why popular things like marijuana legalization are never voted on.
The senate exists to maintain an artificial balance
What do you mean by "artifical balance"?
and make sure that only the approved things are actually voted on
What do you mean, exactly? Bills are debated as they are presented [See 7.6 and 8.1 of the Senate Manual].
That is why popular things like marijuana legalization are never voted on.
I don't understand this point. If you want a senator to introduce a bill regarding the legalization of marijuana, then vote in a senator that will present such a bill.
Mandatory voting just adds semi-random votes, skewing the proportion of people who are really voting for their own interests, but rather out of vibes due to obligation. Holiday on voting days and repealing of disenfranchisement measures work much better.
I don't really see "new countries" being a thing in that way ever again. The USA was new because a "new" piece of land was literally found (well obviously it was already found by other people but you get what I mean).
There is no new land to find today. You can't just set off and create a new country - all of the land is already taken. You'll need to work within the confines of the current countries and try your best to improve them gradually.
At least, any other approach would probably be very bloody...
I mean, the US was just a colonial state that broke ties to the british monarchy, and that shit happens all the time, so I think through that method, there's still a pretty good chance. If you're talking more about like, the establishment of the US as a state through the genocide of the native peoples, intentional or otherwise, I'd say, sure, yeah, that's hopefully never gonna happen again, but general independence movements happen all the time.
I dont understand why Americans are horny for mandatory voting. Voting is mandatory in Greece, it makes no difference. It is theoretically illegal to not vote but are you going to imprison people for not voting? So it isnt enforced, at all.
No one is voting because it is mandatory. Greece has 60% participation.
I believe Australia has mandatory voting and achieves a ~95% participation of registered voters basically every election, though they do enforce it with either a day in court or a fine.
I do wonder if you fined people, or wasted a day of theirs with court, whether it would have an impact in Greece after a couple of elections?
We alao make voting as easy as possible with voting opening 2-4 weeks in advance of election day, election day is always a weekend and as long as you vote before or on election day it's counted.
Also democracy sausages
I think such a high turn out makes our politicians a bit more honest with less empty promises since they can't dissuade anyone from voting.
Right. And for people who try to argue that they shouldn't be forced to choose between people they like like, or whatever, it's important to understand that it is only mandatory to get your name ticked off the list. You don't actually have to submit a valid vote. You can choose to just turn in a blank ballot paper, or write "fuck you" or whatever you like. There are no laws against that.
So the 'mandatory voting' just makes it mandatory to put in the small amount of effort required to show up; but doesn't force you to express an opinion. (Of course, I'd say that you should submit a valid vote. But you don't have to.)
You can not enforce new social norms like that. People, including voting ones, will revolt. They will call it undemocratic and a cash grab. You are just asking for trouble.
I agree many wouldn't bother, but I still believe it should be every citizen's duty to vote. It's literally the bare minimum political involvement people can have.
I wouldnt want idiots having to vote then voting because some friend said some madeup thing or it was the last thing they seen on ticktok. If people don't care and refuse to do the most minimum of looking into politics why should they decide my future
Then it’s a punishment of $100 if you don’t vote. UBI as a reward for participating in our democracy would be a great step. A punishment would be a fine or jailtime.
Does your legal system work on imprisonment or nothing at all? Sounds very extreme.
Here it’s a small fine, but it’s also a day off and takes like 20 mins to go do plus you can get a delicious sausage. So it’s a no brainer that people go vote.
Greece is a pretty failed state from what I’ve seen, wouldn’t read too much into what they don’t do.
As for why compulsory voting, it helps moderate extremism and represents most of society as a whole.
People will call it a cashgrab, that will mostly affect poor people(since the rich people both vote and also dont care about small fines).
it’s also a day off
Greek elections are always on Sunday and people can be given a day off if their voting location is far away(especially back in the day, when moving your voting location was hard).
Greece is a pretty failed state from what I’ve seen
I have been shitting on Greece for my entire life, but it aint cool when non greeks do it. Yes, Greece is fucked but i wouldnt really call it a failed state. It is a shithole but only greeks get to call it a shithole. It also relatively shitholey, in comparison to western european countries.
It just happens to be the worst "western" country. And yes, it is in the East, but the West/East thing was a Cold War thing and Greece was with the "West". Nowadays, many "eastern european" countries have reached and surpassed Greece.
In any case, take a look at the wikipedia map, which countries have compulsory voting
If you exclude Australia, all other countries are shitholes. And i am sure australians will be the first to tell you that Australia is also a shithole and politically fucked.
As for why compulsory voting, it helps moderate extremism and represents most of society as a whole.
It doesnt. If anything, it might do exactly the opposite. When a greek neonazi party was popular, a lot of "apolitic" greeks supported it not because they supported neonazism but because "fuck the system, at least they will go in and smash some heads". When clueless people are forced to vote, they might be clueless about what they are voting.
America's issue is the first past the post, winner takes all system. If the US had a more representative system, that allowed third parties and coalitions(like almost all other democratic countries have), things would have been better.
In particular, the analyses suggest that CV compels a substantial share of uninterested and less knowledgeable voters to the polls. These voters, in turn, cast votes that are clearly less consistent with their own political preferences than those of the more informed and motivated voluntary voters. Claims that CV promotes equal representation of political interests are therefore questionable.
because you could do literally anything else, and it would be more useful. Mandatory voting is the equivalent to asking everyone in the room what they think about every interaction that ever happens. It's fully redundant.
I think this can get messy. It would require a system to prosecute those who don't vote. That kind of registry can be very easily used for nefarious purposes by politicians or just anyone with access to that information. Also, it would really depend on what degree of mandatory this is. If you get thrown in jail then we are going to see a lot of poor people in prison for no reason. If you get just a fine then we are essentially introducing the inverse of a poll tax. Not voting is a protected form of free speech for a reason and can be interpreted as protest.
Merge house into senate
Last time something like this was posted I got flamed for asking what the point of this one is. The Senate is a representation of the states rights we have in our constitution. It serves as a safeguard against heavily populated areas dictating the laws for much less populated states. I'm all for reform but eliminating the Senate all together seems like a step backwards.
Ban tipping
I think this is another one where the spirit of the idea is right but the execution is wrong. What we need to ban is allowing restaurants to pay tipped positions far below minimum wage, and stop allowing restaurants to take a cut of the tip at all.
The act of tipping itself is a cultural thing that needs to be addressed culturally. If you can't tip someone for something, complications in the law arise that may disallow giving money to people in general. For example how do you distinguish between tipping a server for a meal and giving the server a dollar as a gift?
#1. Truly abolish slavery.
#2. Change the legal system from punishment to rehabilitation.
#3. Congress gets minimum wage.
#4. Minimum wage and unemployment must be a livable wage.
A term limit does make sense, but either in the form of a forced retirement age or a 36 year term. They should also be barred from collecting a wage or benefits from any employer after the end of their term (they should get a damn good retirement package, too).
There are good reasons for SCOTUS to be a life appointment. You don’t want them being bought out with lucrative cushy job offers once they leave. 36 years ensures one appointee per presidential term.
What about making the highest tax bracket immutable.
Basically, anyone earning more than that amount, for every dollar of earnings above that amount, taxes cannot be exempted, refunded or otherwise redirected.
Say that tax bracket is 500k/yr, and some rich fuck earns 2M. They must pay the tax, whatever percent of tax that is, on the final 1.5M of earnings. So if it's 50% taxes, they must pay $750k, plus whatever taxation is applicable to the first $500k. They can't skirt it by putting that money into a tax shelter or by donating it to the corrupt charity that they run.
As someone who hates this God forsaken measuring system, I genuinely don't know if the costs of this would ever be worth it. There'd be thousands and thousands of miles marker signs that'd have to be replaced, not to mention having to redo thousands of textbooks.
Plus, when it comes to some things, imperial is just better. Mostly this is carpentry. 12 is way more divisible than 10 and fractions are way easier for cutting than decimal
It would very much be worth it. Imperial invites mistakes by using weird conversions and factional sizes. I often have to stop and think which factions of an inch are bigger or smaller than each other. When Australia switched from imperial to metric, it's estimated they save about 10% annually from having a lower error rate. Fewer things need to get fixed or replaced from measurement mistakes.
A kitchen-scale example: I once mixed up tablespoons and teaspoons when adding baking soda to my pancake mix. They turned out disgusting and we had to re-make breakfast because version 1 was inedible. Such mistakes are less likely to happen under metric.
It's absolutely worth it. If you are worried about textbooks staying in circulation for a long time especially in 2024 then you got bigger issues to be honest.
There are also tons of machines and tools made to work in inches. As more things are becoming computer controlled, it's easier to convert between inch and mm on the fly, but every drill bit, end mill, and tool holder for the manual mill in my company's shop is in inch.
I'm also gonna disagree with you on the 12 better than 10 front. Just use a calculator if you can't do it in your head and round to the nearest mm. I bet you'll learn what 10/6 and 10/3 are faster than 12/5 too.
I can actually do all of those in my head, so that wouldn't be an issue for me.
But yeah, all of my tools and bits and holders are imperial, and someone else better be paying to get the damn things replaced or they are staying imperial even if we go metric. I think the only things I have in metric are allans (allens? I've never had to spell it out), like 2 hole saws from an old project, and a set of calipers I was gifted and have used maybe twice
Everyone thinks the the switch would somehow be overnight and everyone would be required to throw away their old stuff. In reality, you just replace the things when they wear out and all the new equipment is metric. Tada!
Can't we just have both, and teach both? But like, in a more committed fashion than we currently do. Probably swapping out road signs and textbooks as they naturally need to be swapped out, to include both sets of measurements and the conversions between them.
This will be considered for v4 as "Transition to metric system". It would take several years for the transition to completely take place for the average American. I'm also probably going to add "end daylight savings", which is close to being passed anyway.
Not sure if your list is ordered or not, but I would order it in a way where the top N can be implemented sensibly.
For instance, banning tax preparation companies is a bad idea if you haven't first made the IRS file your taxes for you, but your list had the former above the latter.
Likewise, the voting stuff only makes sense if implemented backwards from how you have it:
national holiday first
mail in for all second
mandatory third (this is getting a bit...overreachy?)
There's no benefit to that. Removing the limit on house representatives, that's huge and real, but merging Congress is dumb. There's a few dumb things on the list (eg "abolish gerrymandering" is like saying "abolish speeding"). Choose your favorite!
Edit: Now that I'm not trying to hurry to get ready for work:
Chapter One: the HoRs.
For those that aren't aware of how it works:
There's are two lawmaking bodies with two different purposes. The Senate is equally split among states. There are 2 senators for each state -- as a result, those seats are elected by their entire state (more people voting on each person), and the seats are more competitive (more people want to be elected to that seat). So Senators tend to be more serious politicians, more "universally appealing" (aka centrist). This also makes the Senate the one that gives smaller, or less populous states, more power, because both California and Wyoming get 2 senators, no matter what. These factors contribute to the Senate being a more deliberative body.
The House Representatives are determined by population -- so California has many more senators than Wyoming. They're elected in their district, which can be quite small, so the profile of voters in a district is often very different than in an entire state. (This is why all the crazies are in the House.)
There's a minimum, obviously -- the smallest state will always have at least 1? Or 2? I don't remember. But you can't have a state with no representation, that's not ok.
The problem is, our national population is very very different from what it was. The difference between New York and Maine is much more drastic than it was 200 years ago. But we haven't increased the number of Representatives. And there's a minimum. As the oopulation grows, and the House doesn't, it's becoming more and more unbalanced, in favor of smaller states.
Imagine trying to get smaller states to vote in favor of decreasing their power.
(Also: electoral college votes are on the same system. The electoral college was intended to give smaller states more power, but because there's a minimum, and we haven't reduced the total, it's become super imbalanced. It was a mediocre idea to start with, and now it's even worse. Abolishing the EC is pretty popular, but it might be easier/better to just follow the rules and increase the total number of EC votes. But, again, small states won't agree to it.)
The Constitution says we're supposed to increase the total number of Representatives (and EC votes) but at some point (1929 to be specific) Congress was like nahhhh
Chapter two: why we can't Abolish Gerrymandering.
First of all, it's already illegal.
Secondly, it's hard for outsiders to tell the difference between appropriate "gerrymandering" and actual gerrymandering. If you look at Chicago, where I'm from, there's a weird vote assignment on the west side of the city, it looks manipulated and weird. But if you live here, you know, there's a huge highway that cuts through there that's very hard to cross, so populations on one side are very different from on the other. One side of the highway is there a bunch of Latino immigrants and settled, and on the north side are more affluent (white) people.
(The fact that a highway cuts through a neighborhood isn't an accident, but that's just regular systemic racism, unrelated to Congress.)
If you made the voting map a simple grid, the Latino voters might be split up in a way that reduces their voting power. So the map is weird, but it's actually good that it's weird.
(This is why I said it's like speeding: one, it's already illegal, but two, it's something everyone is doing (and traffic would be super shitty if everyone followed the speed limit), but some people are taking it to an illegal extreme.)
If you look at a state, calculate a percentage of the minorities, and check that number (those numbers -- since there are more than one minority) against the number of districts that vote the way those minorities vote, then, that's what we've decided is "fine" -- and, for real, what else are you going to do.
Illegal gerrymandering is when those blocks of voters ("blocs," is you want to get into Gramsci), are intentionally divided so as to reduce their power. The voting rights act of 1965 made this illegal, and every ten years, after the census, districts are often redrawn. In 2010, we ended up with a lot of gerrymandering. Now,finally, were starting to see some corrections to badly gerrymandered maps, like Alabama, Florida, New York, Wisconsin, Georgia... Louisiana...idr the others, but it's a lot. 2024 is going to have a very very different House of Representatives than the one we have now.
This last point is worth underscoring. The current Republican house majority is due to illegal distract maps. It is, technically, an illegal Congress. So all these ridiculous shenanigans the House Republicans are up to shouldn't be happening. (And, in fact, one could easily make the argument that the high percentage of insane and stupid Republican Representatives is because of the maps -- because the the "depressurization" caused by fair maps would have dialed Congress back to a more centrist stance.
If you want to learn more, check out Democracy Docket, which is a news source from a group of people (lawyers) who are taking bad maps to court.
I feel like the whole gerrymandering debate is missing the point. Why are our elected officials representing land rather than people? The majority of voters in my district are ideologically opposed to my existence, so they elect people who actively try to harm me. No other representatives are allowed to speak on my behalf because I'm not on their patch of land. I have no one representing my interests in the House of Representatives or my state's equivalent. This will be true for someone no matter how you draw the lines.
It would be better to abolish the idea of districts entirely, and come up with some way to award representatives proportionally.
No, that is the original meaning of having three branches, the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. If any of them are not doing their job the other two branches are supposed to hold them accountable (supposed to being the operative term here). I was just saying that the senate was not established as a system of checks and balances against the house of Representatives, but rather as a compromise so that smaller states wouldnt necessarily be completely beholden to one's with much larger populations.
Technically Condorcet method voting is the fairest and least vulnerable to manipulation, but as long as the system works better then FPTP (such as with bonda count) I would be fine with it.
Condorcet is not either of those things but it’s better than some. V321 or STAR outperform all other voting methods by large margins, especially with resistance to strategic voting and manipulation. https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/
Yep, there’s actually another good resource that shows why it’s the case and why IRV is quite terrible (barely better than plurality). I’ll try to find it
ranked choice voting - ok I think we can agree here
Mandatory voting - how? Currently voting is handled state by state, you want to make the federal government take that over? What would the punishment be for not voting? Frankly I disagree with this
Universal vote by mail - even more how? Again, federal takeover of voting process? How do you ensure no votes are lost especially when someone will be punished for not voting?
Voting day national holiday - definitely agree.
Legalize marijuana - this takes a lot more than just saying "marijuana is legal now." Are previous marijuana related convictions going to be overturned, if so how? Are marijuana sales going to be regulated? If so how?
Legalize prostitution - similar questions as with marijuana
Revert citizens United - certainly agree here but that's a big fuckin how? It was explicitly the supreme court overruling a law passed by Congress. Amend the Constitution to say something explicit?
Abolish corporate home ownership - very strange stuff here because you start touching on the above, too. Maybe more you're looking to cancel corporate personhood but that comes with a huge amount of problems too
Abolish electoral college - sure why not if you've solved the voting issues above
Abolish gerrymandering - this is what made me make this response in the first place. You can't just say "abolish gerrymandering" without some plan for it. That's like saying "abolish borders" like it's meaningful. How? Who decides what districts look like? Will there still be districts? If not how will representation be determined?
Abolish filibuster - I think the filibuster is fine. If everything else on this list goes through, hopefully we have meaningful ways of ousting useless obstructionist politicians instead
Merge Senate into house - why? What does this solve?
Remove house rep cap - FUCKING agreed. The cap is unconstitutional and absurd
Universal healthcare - lots of hows here too but Obamacare was a good start and I'm down with single payer
Universal basic income - how much? Does it count toward the 50k below?
Income up to $50k untaxed - fine. I also think any monetary amount in the legislature should be increased by the CPI automatically every year. Fines, limits, payouts, etc.
Ban tax prep - hmm ok
IRS files taxes for citizens - how does this work? Is tax code flattened to make it so citizens have no choices to make? Do things like tax credits for buying solar panels go away?
Vat for luxury items - who decides what's luxury?
Supreme Court 15 year limit - disagree, the whole point of lifetime terms is to prevent getting what's yours and getting out.
Increase highest bracket tax - sure why not
Collateral for loan is realized gain - expand?
Abolish PACs and lobbying
Politicians banned from stocks - so they can't own shares of any companies? Or they just can't trade while in office? Does this go for any elected official? More than just elected officials?
Municipalize Internet - at a minimum declare it a utility. What's the rest of the plan?
Abortion constitutional right - I'd argue it already is one, though the supreme Court evidently isn't in agreement. An explicit "bodily autonomy" amendment would be nice. Add a right to privacy to that too, expanding on the 4th.
Ban tipping - idk if I agree with trying to codify what should be a cultural change, but I'm generally on board with the Idea. There's a million loopholes to close in any language to this effect
free financial education - just like... Government funded seminars? Mandated high school courses? What do you take out to fit this in?
Mandatory voting - how? Currently voting is handled state by state, you want to make the federal government take that over? What would the punishment be for not voting? Frankly I disagree with this
Tax credit for voting. Make it count like a $50 charitable donation would.
If you're thinking, now, "but then poor people would always vote and rich people would be off sailing their yacht", I completely agree.
Yes. Or even better just cut a check or give cash or equivalent.
Make it count like a $50 charitable donation would.
No. That's a deduction, and it's worthless for the vast majority of people who have less in deductions than the standard deduction. Also doesn't reduce taxes by the full amount: a $50 deduction would be at most like an $11 credit (or cash) for most people, if it even mattered.
100% on the "lots of missing 'how's" point. You skipped the "ban lobbying" one, which is probably the second biggest "how" after the gerrymandering.
Lobbying is not some official policy or process. Senators don't have "lobbying hours." Lobbying is basically just "being at lunches and parties that politicians are at." Unless you're proposing Congress not be allowed to go out in public and live as secluded monks, I don't see how you "abolish" it..
We have mandatory voting in Australia. It's "enforced" by a AU$20 fine. Not really a true punishment, more like a nudge. It's more of a societal understanding here, you turn up to a polling place as a civil duty. You can donkey vote if you want, you can draw a cock on the ballot form and invalidate it, doesn't matter. As long as you got your name crossed off, and most importantly had the opportunity to vote, then you're clear.
I wouldn't have it any other way, it means that there can't be changes to dissuade people from voting, and politicians don't resort to wildly populist policies to try and encourage people to come out to vote.
Also helps that federal elections always occur on a Saturday, and employers are required to give time off in order to vote.
That's exactly my point. There are people working hard to make these things happen and generally these are very well supported by the public, but without the plan behind them, theres no substance here.
The reason these don't get passed is because of the particulars of implementation. you can't write a bill with the only text being "universal healthcare" without a lot more to it. Once there's a lot more to it, then it gets picked apart and rejected.
Politicians banned from stocks - so they can't own shares of any companies? Or they just can't trade while in office? Does this go for any elected official? More than just elected officials?
What about only allowing investments in broad index funds? But banning trading specific stocks and options could go a long way too.
Sure but what's the actual action there? Implementation of a wealth tax? What property counts for that? Is there some other technique he/you are talking about? Taking a loan will now count as income?
Making a loan count as income will mess up legit home purchases. If you went that route it couldn't be that simple.
A big benefit to the buy borrow die strategy is the step up basis for your children. Realizing the gain will move the basis up and cause a taxable event.
I don't know all the details, much less if this plan is perfect, but I think that's the idea.
Maybe removing step up basis is enough, to help reduce generational wealth. IDK
Banning tipping in restaurants implies that servers would need to be paid a fair wage without needing tips to make up for a lack of wages. Menu prices would incorporate those costs. Tipping in restaurants is the most invasive which is why I chose restaurants specifically.
So instead of banning tipping you mean removing minimum wage exceptions for tipping.
Fwiw a lot of restaurants worldwide are starting to include an obnoxious 12+% "service charge" that can be "removed" if you have a complaint. Basically, enforced tipping that wouldn't be changed by your "ban tipping" plan.
I definitely agree hard with more emphasis on removal of after-the-listed-price fees
A commendable attempt at building the foundations of a progressive movement that breaks the current political stagnation we have endured for the past forty years or more.
Unfortunately the majority of people are inexplicably content to be shafted by successive governments whatever their political persuasion.
Ranked choice is quite terrible actually, barely better than Plurality (also known as FPTP). The center for election science has a whole article on it here. https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/
3-2-1 voting and STAR are the best choices, but the CES actually advocates for approval due to logistics and people getting confused by 321 and star.
Australia has had mandatory voting for eligible voters (18+) for a long time. It works like this:
Prior to elections, the Australian Electoral Commission updates the electoral roll of all eligible voters. On election day, voters have their names crossed off the roll at whichever polling place they attend.
After the election, the electoral roll is cross-checked against voter records. Anyone who didn't vote and can't provide a valid reason (for example - illness, living remotely, religious beliefs) is issued a $20 fine by the AEC. If not paid, this can escalate to further fines of around $180 plus court costs if convicted.
Over 180,000 penalty notices were issued after the 2022 federal election to enforce the compulsory voting laws. While controversial to some, the system has maintained over 90% voter turnout in Australia for nearly a century.
A similar system would probably moderate political extremes in the US. I think any fine that is used as a means of enforcement needs to be scaled to the means of the individual being fined in order to not disproportionately target lower wealth individuals (but an elimination of the enforcement fine completely for the lower end of the wealth scale would maybe ironically result in less from that group voting and thus give them disproportionately lower representation in outcomes).
if you're going to require voting, give me a good fucking candidate to vote for, for fucks sake. This does nothing to prevent degradation of the candidacy.
thanks for this, provided a lot of insight. for those interested, $20 AUD = $13.06 USD.
i find that this change only might be useful in the US, especially if introduced gradually and after other measures such as a voting holidy (very important!) and vote by mail rather than all-at-once, but i think is less tenable as a position than in Australia due to the following differences:
class: the USA generally has a significantly larger wealth gap than Australia; this directly relates to the fee and i agree with your assessment that any fines should be appropriately scaled; still a concern
staus quo: the longevity of the policy indicates that the country has the voting infrastructure to handle a 100% turnout without unintentional disenfranchisement, long travel times or long wait times
population distribution: this is a lot different in the US and again affects infrastructure. we already know that low income areas are subject to the worst of wait times, travel times, and environmental conditions while voting so it’s super important to be concious of what CV is doing for those populations. vote by mail aids this but is still a concern.
conclusion: compulsory voting, in my opinion, should not be on this list because it is nowhere near as effective nor feasible as the other election measures already listed.
Nothing screams authoritarianism quite like having to spend 10 mins at a local school on a Saturday, once every couple of years, and drawing a big old big on the ballot paper.
my comment was a genuine question please respect that.
what is the method of enforcement? like if it’s prison, or even time in court. yeah that’s weird and it gives authoritarianism vibes.
if it’s a fine, what is the price point? what about those who cannot afford to travel to vote nor to pay? and what is stopping the wealthy from just paying the fine and skipping elections anyway?
or like what other options of enforcement are there? i just don’t think making voting mandatory is at all needed to ensure free and fair elections and it just has an icky vibe to it.
edit: also you say “every couple years.” are you aware that elections are held several times per year in most parts of the US? or are we just making federal elections mandatory?
edit 2: you say “10 minutes.” when waiting times for voting of 30 minutes or even an hour are not rare. so what is the solution there?
We empirically explore the effects of a sanctioned compulsory voting law on direct-democratic decision making in Switzerland. We find that compulsory voting significantly increases electoral support for leftist policy positions in referendums by up to 20 percentage points. (Michael M. Bechtel, Dominik Hangartner, Lukas Schmid)
…which is cool and admittedly something i was unaware of. nevertheless i still find that the means of obtaining this end questionable.
Proponents of mandatory voting also tend to be supportive of other voting reforms which would make it faster and easier to vote. For example, vote by mail and removing the selective service requirement for men. With some properly implemented reforms, the time it takes to vote could easily be reduced to ten minutes or less.
Mandatory voting would also push the responsibility of ensuring that people have an opportunity to vote on the government, which is really how it should be anyway, but it behooves the powers that be to keep turnout lower. At least in theory, this would obviously need to be codified.
As for religious exemption, I think most mandatory voting advocates would only want to require that every citizen turn in a ballot, but not that it be filled out in any particular way. An objector could turn in a blank ballot or write in a fictitious candidate by that standard. They would have no real sway on the political state, so unless they have a religious objection to filing paperwork they don't have much to complain about. Even so, there could easily be a way to allow people to apply for an exemption.
Your right about punishments being a fraught subject here, though I think everyone's on the same page about them being pretty light. A "realistic" (this whole thread is pretty unrealistic) implementation would probably involve some minor penalty on your tax returns, though personally I'm not happy with that solution.
The point is to push the onus of providing voting opportunities on the government, and increase overall turnout. As I can anecdotally attest, and as you seem to have found on your own, people who don't vote often do have strong opinions. They either don't vote out of laziness or a lack of access. Mandatory voting would fix the former and would necessarily be bundled with legislation to fix the latter.
thanks. i like your framing of putting the onus of voting opportunities on the government. and i think that any good election reform process would implement CV as the last step of a series of careful and intentional change; it doesn’t really fit as one of three “quick fixes” to voting opportunities, hence my initial reaction.
Jail time? Tell me you're American without telling me you're American... I happen to be one of the dozens of people who do not live in the US, so my state and local elections are at the same time, and federal is usually in between. They group them together because efficiency. Pretty sure the penalty in every developed economy is a small fine equivalent to a parking ticket. I don't know exactly, because I've been postal voting for a decade due to my debilitating case of "religious reasons", so I get my ballot in the mail a week in advance, and If I didn't want to vote I'd just mail it back empty (free fyi). I also voted from my phone at a foreign airport one time. Pretty sure I've missed one too, and know several people in their 40's and 50's who've never enrolled, never voted, and never been fined. Turns out "mandatory" is pretty loose when you aren't living in a dictatorship.
The argument FOR mandatory voting is to encourage political parties to reach out and engage all adults (e.g. "we the people"), instead of focusing their policies, campaigning, and financing on specific subsets of the population, or specific geographies (e.g. electoral college), or engage in other methods like voter disenfranchisement, etc, etc — basically to mitigate against the USA's brand of bastardized anti-democracy, and authoritarianism, from happening.
so… mandatory voting for you isn’t actually mandatory voting, it’s in fact a much broader series of measures aimed to reduce obstacles to voting and putting the onus of the election on the government rather than the people. got it, and i like that.
heads up that other comments here swayed my opinion but yours have been truly just disrespectful and unhelpful.
There are probably many ways you could go about this: Requiring that employees have a representative on the board of all corporations, forcing companies to give a certain amount of equity to employees, all businesses have to be worker co-ops, maybe some kind of automatic unionization? The point is to give workers more say in how businesses are run and a fairer cut of the value they produce, which would probably end up fixing some of the other things on this list as a byproduct.
News reporting must be factual and clearly distinguishable from opinion and other non-news programming.
Something needs to be done about deliberate propaganda and misinformation. I'm not sure what the answer is here, but maybe having some rules for what can be called "news" would be a start.
Enumerated right to bodily autonomy
This would cover abortion, prostitution, and marijuana consumption, and would also cover many forms of trans healthcare that are currently under attack. Speaking of which...
Strengthened protections for minorities, including legal recognition of trans and intersex people.
Something like the Equal Rights Amendment but for all minorities. Let's explicitly get it into law that you can't discriminate based on something people are born with.
I don't agree with merging the House and Senate; uncapping the House fixes the proportionality issue and the Senate is a useful check to ensure that smaller states still have a voice.
Adding 5% to the highest tax bracket seems way too low. There should be a new top bracket with a rate so high it's almost confiscatory; anyone earning that much is a resource hoarder and should be made to share with the rest of society. We used to have a top tax rate of 95%, so this isn't unrealistic.
Banning tax prep is redundant if the IRS is calculating it for you, and I wouldn't want to outright ban it for those whose financial situations may be complicated enough to actually need it.
Why are we including a ban on tipping? I feel like we're getting lost in the details here. This should be a shorter list of high-level changes. If you don't like tipping, wouldn't it be better to do something about employers not giving fair wages in general?
How you gonna afford all the social schemes with no tax under $50K? I have "free" healthcare but it's 2% of my taxable income. The taxable brackets start at $18,200 ($11,880 USD) here. You'll need to ensure there is finance for social services else you'll be bringing harm to your society in the form of failed infrastructure.
Mainly: "Increase highest bracket tax (+5%)", "VAT for luxury items", "Collateral for loan is realized gain". Universal basic income will put money back into the economy and generate sales tax. Legalizing marijuana will bring in tax revenue when regulated properly, same with prostitution. Universal healthcare will arguably save us money over time.
And by the way, that 2 trillion dollar tax cut they got from their orange canary god would've paid for the US military budget 3 times and still had enough left over to solve world hunger, educate everyone, and end homelessness.
Well, the tin-foil-hat answer is because they make more by investing it here, namely, in politicians. (Like Musk bought Twitter in an attempt to control the national discourse, so he could, you know, help influence who gets elected and make more money.)
It's probably just more profitable here. We're a Capitalist nation. Capitalists are gonna wanna play our game. If you had a giant stack of bills in Monopoly, you wouldn't take a bunch of them over to the Chutes and Ladders table.
No employee, owner, shareholder, investor, contractor, etc. can make more than 50 times the amount of the lowest paid employee, contractor, supplier employee, supplier's supplier employee, etc. (Including all of the foreign slaves).
Tim Cook wants to earn 50M per year? Then all of those Foxconn guys that they need nets to stop from suiciding need to make at least 1M. All of the guys making chips have to make 1M. All of the guys mining coal to produce the electricity have to make 1M.
Income inequality problems would be abated. "Dey took our yobs." would be less of a problem because you would save money by using local labor due to lower shipping costs. Poverty would eventually be eliminated.
Probably communism with extra steps, but maybe it would be less prone to party dictators.
A benefit rather than a detriment. Have a benefit offered only to those who have voted in the past election. It could be even paired with the universal basic income, an extra $100 added to your monthly UBI if you are a registered voter who has voted in the most recent election. With universal vote by mail, election day being a holiday, and plenty of early voting days leading up to the election there would be no excuse to not vote.
I'm not sure it would be a good idea, even if it's a benefit instead of a detriment.
Ignorant or apathetic voters with no stake in or care for politics will just vote to obtain benefits without doing any research beforehand. That leads to them either voting for the first person on the ballot or the name they hear the most.
A fewer number of informed voters would be more likely to lead to progressive changes, in my opinion. Uninformed throw-away voters adds noise and introduces a demographic that can be influenced by candidate popularity rather than their policies.
Convert corporations into Worker Consumer Cooperatives to prevent investor wealth accumulation and regulatory capture and align business towards worker and consumer interests rather than short-term profit seeking.
I will consider this for v4, although I'm still torn on whether that's a good idea. It would give religious entities a direct reason to influence politics even more. Any good reasons to the benefit other than more tax revenue?
Then better enforce the separation of church and state, to ensure they dont influence politics.
I thought the reason they were not taxed was to ensure they didnt influence politics.
Yea after more research this is the conclusion I've come to. I think ending the tax-exempt status of religious entities is the best solution to stop the problem.
i think there is potential to do one better and find a more productive solution. start a crackdown, investigate religious entities that are clearly making a profit from rental land. threaten them with removal of tax exemption. investigate institutions that participate in political activity. threaten them with taxes.
if the IRS would start doing this for all the ultra wealthy, this will be a natural antecedent to that process.
i don’t see why it has to be an all or nothing deal, unless i am missing something huge.
oh sorry there’s another key fact to this, religious institutions are tax exempt under 501(c)(3) in the same way as all other charitable organizations.
so going after “religious organizations” already means you are going to have to define which 501c3s are “allowed” or not—and unfortunately there’s a lot of crossover of semi-but-not-really religious groups. so any attempt at un-tax-exempting churches is going to look like persecution to some because the line is going be drawn somewhere. think of yoga or mindfulness studios, plenty of which are 501c3. are they religious? well, yeah, often. all of them? certainly not. so how do you choose? in any raw “tax the church” scenario you end up litigating what consitutes “religious” or not—which looks like ( and arguably might be) proto-persecution.
so, investigate the profit. publish the documents showing a church breaking its 501c3 requirements. give them 180 days to knock it off or something, then tax them like the rest of us. you’ll probably also catch some non-religious 501c3s doing shady stuff as well—and all the better.
hope this makes sense.
edit: i guess the other assumption i made is that we don’t want to just… tax all non profits. i hope we both can agree that would be shitty lol.
edit 2: ok you don’t make that assumption, so there we go.
think of yoga or mindfulness studios, plenty of which are 501c3
They shouldn't be tax exempt either. If they generate profit, they should pay tax on it. Subsidies are used to benefit specific activities, and they are easier to investigate for fraud as to whether the subsidy is spent as intended.
The sheer amount of land they would have to sell off to be able to pay their taxes would drive prices down for houses and farms. The LDS own something like 850,000 acres or something of just farm land. People could build affordable housing or just housing in places increasing supply.
It all starts with the top - proportional representation.
It still amazes me that states have those proposition votea/referenda started by petitions and yet there isn't a movement to get proportional representation on the ballot? Or if there is it seems pretty quiet from outside the US.
Why would a two party system implement ranked choice if everyone is stupid enough to keep voting for them? They're not going to shoot themselves in the foot.
the problem is that we have to vote, one of the two of them is going to get into office, that's just how it works. Ranked choice would likely involve repealing that as well.
So, some of these are great. And some of them are so unrealistic they will NEVER happen in a trillion universes. I don't think it's healthy or productive to conflate great talking points with this crud because it just devalues the argument as a whole.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
which part of "except as a punishment" was actually unclear in those laws that currently still "protect" slavery since how many centuries now?
did you already ask your gov how many are enslaved due to this slavery protection law today? do you know how many are today tortured because slaves still do not have any laws protecting them? tell me which laws you think would protect slaves today from torture? could they call a lawyer? by which law if they dont have rights? this "don't have rights" was a huge part of slavery, right? so tell me, as this law clearly states the possibility of slaves, which laws would protect them? how could you tell if there are no other mentionings in any other law? i guess you just can't, because this law protects slavery but no law protects the victims of it.
so if you did not ask your government yet about the total numbers (which could be 0 of course as you claim), on what "knowledge" are your believes based on then?
pls let me know!
i remember news about children put into cages at the southern border, i remember that originally a five digit number of families was in the news, later on claims, that those kids were sexually abused instead of beeing taken care for, they tried to find them but only got a low 4 digit number of them back. what would you say happened to those at "unknown locations"? i do see a "possible" direct link to the slavery-protection by law you seem to believe would actually "prohibit" it.
Just having this exception in the laws degrades the credibility of the whole country. Why not get rid of this shit then?
And thus if you were right that slavery does not happen any more (wow cool, a real step towards civilisation) then it should also not be of any problem of any kind to remove that exception from the laws right today before sunset, right? who would even hesitate?? if there are none who currently "profit" from that law, or who are already planning to profit from it by creating false evidences of "crimes" sufficient to apply this laws to innocent ones in front of some of those "secret courts", if none of such exists, why not just remove this exemption then and if only to really have more civilized law afterwards ???
IMHO "abolish slavery" needs to be on that list, so this list could have any meaning at all.
Wow man you must be reading my mind. Was actually working on a website to do something like this with civil discussion. There are a ton of things missing to this list but it's a good base line.
Edit: website will include the milestones required to complete each change including why important and potential impact, negative and positive, and difficulty of task.
I think the actions on this list would improve economic conditions for the middle class.
I’ll just say if prostitution is legalized, then there needs to be something that ensures that someone isn’t coerced into it somehow, or sex trafficked into it.
Sure, but be careful with "universal basic income" ,"taxes" and actual national expenses.
What you have there is a wish list. It's a good wishlist, but an actual plan requires planning. Including how the math works out. Which can be done, but you still need to do it.
Making election day a holiday probably won't have the effect you're hoping for.
Best case: Almost everybody goes to work as usual. A few of them get a pay differential for working the holiday.
Worst case: Holiday means holiday. We'll give all bus drivers the day off to vote -- and hope the bus riders live within walking distance of their polling location.
It's already illegal to open other people's mail. Intercepting mail in the US is a really quick way to get absolutely fucked by the law. There haven't been any cases of people's votes being recorded as far as I've searched. What more would you want?
An online voting system would be great. Keep the in person, just allow online as well, election locations all the sudden are not busy at all and online is easy access.
5% tax on highest bracket not nearly enough. Normal citizens pay like 30%, they should reduce the normal bracket to somewhere around 10-15 percent, raise top bracket to about 49%, and tax businesses at the same rate.
Currently what billionaires do is never sell their assets so that they never have to pay capital gains tax (since they haven't realised the gain), but then take out large loans using those assets as collateral and live off the loans. That allows them to enjoy the benefits of their capital gain without ever paying tax on it.
The line you quoted is saying that if you use some asset as collateral for a loan then for tax purposes that should count as realising any gains in value
Under the current system, i think we'd call these interest only loans. It only works in a scarce resource situation that drives cost. And we do exactly this to eliminate private mortgage insurance, a debt to equity ratio.
It has no chance of becoming a reality without the help of moderates and liberals who have made it very clear they would rather lose to MAGA than compromise with leftists and progressives.
People have yet to acknowledge the first implications of this. If we believe the numbers of progressives and leftists are growing there will come a time when we begin winning primaries but will lose general elections consistently because moderates and liberals suddenly won't "vote blue no matter who". Which means fascism isn't just a possibility, it's guaranteed.
If moderates and liberals don't make different choices there's nothing we can do.
I’ve sort of come to the conclusion that the spirit of the times has turned toward chaos and away from stability. These sorts of vague political commitments no longer have the power to avert the disaster we’re facing. We are fully in the grip of vast, impersonal historical forces again, and just have to see what happens.
Needs more limitations on investment in the stock market, more investment into co-ops and employee owned businesses, and more investment into rail infrastructure and other good civic infrastructure at the federal level. Also, change from general ranked choice voting, to the schulze method.
Also I wanna see a real move towards taco tuesday. We think it's a meme or whatever, but like an experimental free food day, or free single meal, for at least one day a week, seems totally achievable, and like it would do some good. Maybe try to integrate some community gardening into it or something, set up some federal system for that, that would be fucking sick dude hoo lee.
Edit: If you're getting rid of states, or like, trying to rethink them, I think I remember seeing some maps redrawn with states if they all had totally equal population, which you could do, and I've also seen some maps that allocate states based more on natural resources, than just having like, a lot of the western states be shitty squares and stuff. I think I saw one based on water tables, but I can't seem to find it or remember the name of it. You'd probably wanna go in for stuff like that, if you wanted to still retain the idea of states, and give them a reason to exist but also be fair and not lame.
How about age limits for government officials as well? Or at least the senate. The grandma at the tax form place in city hall is ok even if she a bit slow.
Legalize all drugs. Keep prices low(street value) with quality monitoring paid for by tax of product. Any further tax revenue from product to be used for addiction treatment.
Again, replace the senate with proportional representation. Bicameral legislatures work, there's no reason to be rid of the senate. Just give it a purpose beyond "you represent a state". Expand the senate to 600 seats, National votes for party reps, 0.5% threshold to gain a seat, 6 year terms, rotate every two years. Then we'll get actual third parties into office, which will break up the two party strangle hold.
I am actually not sure about the coroprate home ownership point. Here in Germany renting is much more common and accepted compared to the US, and i think there are lots of situations where this makes sense. However both in the US and here in Germany the systems need changes. And i think they should mostly target land ownership rather than the houses themself. What drives up the prices in desired areas are mostly increases in land value, not that building houses got that much more expensive (although that is also a factor).
And most of that value gain are from external factors rather than the owners own merit. If someone builds an architectually great and energy efficient house or develops land, then it is fine if he gains value from it. But if simply owning the property improves the value over time, because society around it builds nice schools, parks and so on. Then the owner hasn't done anything and that profit should be taxed completely away. If that makes sense.
That said there probably should also be a mechanism to support the first home people own to counteract scale efficiencies that corporations might be able to leverage.
Not sure if outright banning stocks for politicians is the way to go, but there should be more points regarding transparancy and conflicts of interest. Also not just during their time in office, but after that aswell.
I'd have no issue with politicians holding a borad market index fund.
I'd suggest a "universal basic income" be labelled something like "American Citizen Permanent Fund" or something like they did in Alaska with the "Alaska Permanent Fund".
Mostly. I'm fine with some of these being left up to the states, like prostitution and marijuana, although I do think marijuana's federal status should change (from schedule 1, to a much lower schedule). Also, I think the highest tax bracket should be 99%, or even 100%. But that highest bracket should be a very high number, like 0.001% of GDP.
Legalizing Prostitution just creates more Human Trafficking, as a result of allowing human traffickers to operate in the open under the guise of legality. We have decades of evidence that lead to this conclusion. We don't need to keep trying it.
I agree. However, I'm curious exactly what type of ranked voting system you would advocate for — Instant Runoff, Single Transferable Vote, etc.
Mandatory Voting
I disagree. The right to vote also encompasses one's right to not vote. Even if one ignores the freedom aspect of it, an argument could be made that mandatory voting would actually have a negative effect: forcing people to vote, who otherwise wouldn't've, will likely cause them to choose whomever they are the most familiar with — essentially, this means that the person who can afford the most advertising is the most likely to win. Furthermore, as pointed out in this comment, there are potential privacy risks associated with tracking voters.
Universal vote by mail
I disagree. There is too much potential for abuse.
Voting day national holiday
I agree.
Legalize marijuana
I agree — granted, I would legalize all drugs. However, I'm of the opinion that selling it to minors should still be illegal. I've also been considering the idea that any entity that wants to engage in the sale of addictive substances must also provide, proportional to their sale volume, rehabilitation centers. There would also need to be strict regulation, such as there is with the sale of food, on their production, and composition.
Legalize prostitution
I agree. Of course, this would then mean that prostitutes would be entitled to the same employee protections, and rights as anyone else.
Revert Citizens United v. FEC
I'm not very familiar with this court case, so my answer isn't thoroughly thought out, but, if I understand it correctly, that ruling overturned a previous ruling that prohibited some forms of election spending. If so, I would agree with such a ruling — I believe that people have the right to spend their money where they see fit. It is the voter's duty to determine whether the person should be elected.
Abolish corporate home ownership
I disagree. I'm not sure I understand your rationale behind this one. Why don't you think this should be allowed? As long as the land-value taxes are being payed, the people are being justly compensated for the ownership of that land.
Abolish the electoral college
I haven't come to a firm decision on this matter. Would you mind elaborating on your rationale?
Abolish gerrymandering
While I agree with the sentiment that gerrymandering is bad, what would you suggest should be done to "abolish" it?
Abolish filibuster
I disagree (I don't disagree with the idea that filibustering is bad. I disagree that it should be prohibited). It is the duty of the voters to hold their representatives to account.
Merge senate into house
I disagree (from the perspective of the U.S. Congress). I would like to know your rationale for why you want them merged. The intent of a bicameral legislature is to act as a sort of "check and balance" on new legislation — it plays an important role in a federation. Do you disagree that this is the case? If so, why?
Remove house rep cap
I've never thought about this. I'm inclined to agree. I can't think of, nor can I find, any good reason for why there is a cap beyond the arbitrary.
Universal healthcare
This a tricky one. I'm not yet convinced that it is as cut and dry as many people make it out to be — there are many caveats. I, at the very least, am strongly inclined to favor a hybrid system. There are also certain circumstances where a free market is simply not compatible (e.g. emergency departments).
Universal basic income
While I understand the rationale that it would effectively cover one's right to life, I have economic concerns. Primarily, I am concerned that it would lead to runaway inflation. I have considered other options like breaking down the necessities for life into categories and apportioning them equally (e.g. foodstamps). I have not yet come to a conclusion on this matter.
Income up to $50k untaxed
I'm more of the thinking that income taxes should be abolished.
Ban tax preparation companies
...why? I suppose there is some lobbying risk, but, beyond that, I don't understand this one. However, even if there was lobbying risk, they are within their rights, imo.
IRS files taxes for citizens
This may only be possible for simple taxes. Anything more complicated than simple income tax would not really be feasible, I think. Also, it is important to note that the IRS does already offer this, to an extent. I could be mistaken, though. In all honesty, I think the solution is to just simply taxes, rather than trying to obfuscate away their unnecessary complexity. This, most likely, will just lead to more bloat, and money wastage.
VAT for luxury items
Generally, I would disagree with the implementation of a VAT. The only tax on products that I would support is one that is in the form of compensation to the public for damages (e.g. environmental taxes).
Supreme court 15 year term limit
I'm not certain on the exact number, but I am in favor of the idea of term limits for non-elected officials.
Increase highest bracket tax (+5%)
Again, I'm more in favor of abolishing income tax.
Collateral for loan is realized gain
I don't understand the rationale for this. Would you mind elaborating?
Abolish PACs and lobbying
This is similar to the point about Citizens United v. FEC. It is the voter's job to hold elected officials accountable.
Politicians banned from stocks
I think this is sort of missing the point. What you're effectively getting at is that insider trading should be illegal, which it is. The real question is why the SEC, or related government agencies in other countries, doesn't seem to go after some people when it seems obvious that they are engaging in insider trading.
Municipalize internet service
Hm. I'm generally against adding any more government bloat unless absolutely necessary. One of the main issues with how ISPs are structured is that they somewhat currently function as an monopoly — due to intrinsic factors. This is the main reason, in my opinion, why prices are high, and why the service is often bad. Intrinsic monopolies are a tough issue to solve. I'm not sure that creating a government run ISP would make the problem any better. If anything, it might actually get worse. A cooperatively owned ISP may work, though.
Abortion constitutional right
This will always be a tricky issue. In my opinion, both sides of the debate have fair arguments. The main question is "whose rights trump whose?" Is it the baby, or the mother? Whichever one that one chooses, I would like to know their rationale. It is not an easy question to answer, imo. It most likely will always lie more in the realm of philosophy than in hard fact, which, of course, doesn't lend itself well to legislation. If I were pushed to side with a group, I would most likely side with the mother.
Ban restaurant tipping
I disagree. That being said, I certainly would like for tipping culture to die. It is not my job to ensure that an employee is payed well — that is between them and their employer.
Free financial education
I'm more in the camp of wholly restructuring how education is done, but that is out of the scope of this comment. I agree that economic literacy is important, but my beliefs on the matter of education go far beyond only that — I believe that we need a fundamental restructuring of the education system.
not sure about the mandatory voting and outlawing tipping. Just compliance wise. Not voting itself can be a intended thing and I can't think of any country where you have a gun to your head to vote taht is a place I would want to live. As for tipping you will just turn it into bribery. No place should be allowed to pay with the expectation tips is part of compensation. Tips are a gift basically.
UBI requires such a large reorganization of the economy that you may as well add democratization of the workplace, and it would get done earlier. I think both would be great personally.
The rest are definitely good, I'm thinking just having a whole ass revolution might be easier than getting all this done, and as a bonus would come with additional benefits.
If it can possibly be done without a revolution, that is by far the better and easier choice.
Revolutions are messy, difficult, a great time for power seekers to consolidate power and eliminate the competition, and in the history of mankind, most of them have not resulted in positive change.
They are extremely dangerous, and should never be considered anything other than an absolute last resort when nothing else has any hope of working anymore.
Famine is probably a good indicator of when the situation is bad enough for a revolution to be a potentially rational choice. If significant portions of the population are in danger of famine, then it may be time for a revolution. We are quite far from that point still, fortunately.
I like a lot of your proposals,but I don’t think they will fix everything. Certainly an improvement though.
I don’t think the supreme court changes would fix issues with the court, and I think a 15 yr. limit could make it worse.
Each presidential term would get 2-3 nominations per term, allowing them to establish a majority if elected for 2 terms. Considering how powerful the court is, allowing a president to establish a majority simply by being in office for 2 terms isn’t great.
How about a wall around the crazy states, everyone can go and come for some years, after that, close it. Let them drown in guns and bubbles, I say. - a joke, apparently. I like the list, maybe fight all the cults where old guys marry several underaged girls, too. Oh yeah, they still exist.
careful lol i recognize this is a joke coming from a good place probably but this is verging on a fascist talking point. trans people being abused by the florida government and children being murdered in texas schools have a right to safety, not to be simply ignored with the opportunity to abandon their home in a few years.
I’d personally abolish the senate and leave the house alone, or change the house to one rep per every x number of people instead of whatever we do now.
The house and senate should both exist, they both serve a purpose. The senate gives every state an equal footing, the house gives every state representation in regards to population, so they both serve a very explicit purpose.
idk about house rep cap. There are already so many, perhaps improve the makeup of the reps though? That's pretty messy.
on the supreme court term limit, include an age limit as well.
That's it, everything else would be fine probably?
One thing I’ve been mulling over is “tax stock dividends at source.” So if a company is paying out dividends to stockholders, there’s no hiding it, the tax to the IRS is paid up front.
I like where you're going here, and the only things I disagree with are the Senate merge and Electoral College as these still serve a purpose. The removal of the House cap will rebalance there, and if anything the Senate could be reverted from popular election back to being appointed by the State Legislatures so they rebalance back to being actual actors for the State as intended vs overpowered Representatives.
The Electoral College helps balance democracy being 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner, but maybe get some math experts to review the equation for apportionment and/or set all electors to be proportional to the vote percentages in every state.
I’m happy if the mail comes on time. I don’t think the government could properly manage these broad sweeping programs especially with radical changes to the legislative and judicial branches and elections.
Nor do I think you’d be able to get the states on board with this much radical change. Everything sounds ok on a surface level but rather than thinking pie in the sky, pragmatism would be needed on just the most important issues such as a universal health plan or education plan
IRS filing taxes for us could lead to unintended consequences, like them just saying "yep, everything's in order here. you're all paid up. What's that? Tax return? No, you paid the exact amount you owed in taxes, so you get no return." and probably you'd have to do a FOIA request to get a copy of the return, then you could probably fight it, but it'd cost more to fight it than you'd get back in the return in the first place.
I'd rather focus on ripping cars out of cities, promoting mixed use zoning areas, removing regulations on food service (which is the reason small American food vendors need food trucks, instead of "street food" like the rest of the world.
The disjointed, car based, child hating society we have is a big problem.
I would love most of these to be implemented. But I wouldn't want the Senate to be merged because of separation of powers. Better to have a mandatory retirement age or term length for all politicians.
Also, I would like every law that has been and will be enacted by the Senate, that only affects the Senate and other positions of power, to be voted by the people in a popular vote. This way corruption by conflict of interest wouldn't happen so blatantly like it has in the past.
Abolishing corporate ownership is stupid. What does that even achieve?
If you trying to fix the housing market this is completely the wrong way to go about it. The issue is the value of the land isn't correctly valued. Things like LVT, density minimums (increasing with population growth), good rail links again with dense redevelopment near the stations.
Things like this will fix the housing market.
Unless you worried about landlords being dicks you just need better laws. Like what are you actually trying to achieve? I don't get it.
People who dont want children should not have one. It is that simple. You want less abortions? More education and cheap and available contraception is the way. People won't magically want to have more kids if you force them to birth one.
Mostly good stuff. I don't think I'd merge house and Senate. Some of them need more constraint, like I'd legalize prostitution, but only if it's regulated like restaurants (health inspectors, workers rights, etc.).
What is your solution the massively disproportionate representation in the senate then? There are currently around 66.7 Californians for every Wyomingite. Do you think Wyomingites deserve 66.7 times the representation in the Senate? And yes, legalization would occur with reasonable regulations which would make sure the industry is safer for all those involved. I tried to keep the list as concise as possible for each issue reformed.
Do you think wyoming deserves to be a state? Every state gets the same representation in the Senate and I think that's fair. I don't think it's fair that the proportional side of the legislature isn't proportional anymore, though, and fixing that goes a very long way.
States don't deserve equal representation. American citizens deserve equal representation, they are the ones who create value.
Then what you’re really saying is abolish the concept of states and have a single federal state.
No, states still would elect a number of representatives based on their population. Just no 2 senators per state.
Why even have states? Good way to get rid of jerrymandering would be to get rid of imaginary borders. No states, no senate necessary.
Something something…. Redraw state lines every 10 years…
Because state legislatures should continue to exist. If less populated conservative states want to go down a rabbit hole of far right shit then let them. Just don't give them 2 senators per state to gridlock the states that continue to produce and provide for their population.
The Senate isn't intended to be a representative body, it's just two per state. They aren't doing things like setting funding/budgets. Congress (the house of representatives) is designed to do that, though that needs some tweaking.
Both the house and senate vote to pass bills. The disproportionate population increases have led to less representation of citizens in more populated states.
But the original states didn't have balanced populations, the founders knew that, but they still set it to be two senators per state. The house is scaled by population.
They did that for as part of a negotiation though. The less populous states refused to join the union without something like the Senate.
To me it's an outdated concept because states are much less independent now than they were back then. And we have a national identity that didn't exist during the revolution.
There are other proposals to solve the Senate's disproportionate nature, such as apportioning Senate seats by state population. Most proposals I've seen for that would leave the Senate with a little more than a hundred seats (with a minimum of 1 seat per state), which would (mostly) solve the problem and make it closer to the house in terms of proportionality. Of course, it all depends on the exact implementation.
What's the purpose of the senate at that point? Seems redundant, like having two house of representatives.
That is in fact the point. It's about checks and balances to stop bad actors from completely changing all of the rules the moment their party is in power. Of course, that's completely pointless in a 2 Party system anyways and we should really reform campaign finance and election laws surrounding how to get on the ballot.
The point of the Senate is that it's a more deliberative body, representing larger numbers of people, which serves to moderate the power of the House. Mind you, Congress as a whole was more powerful when the nation was founded; they've handed off power to the executive over the years, for better or worse (really, a bit of both). The House was also intended to grow with the population, and if we'd followed the general guidelines for growth the Founders suggested, we'd have a House with more than 600 members. The number of seats was capped ~90 years ago, because Congress didn't want to fund another renovation of the capitol building to fit more people. Also keep in mind that the States had a more uniform population distribution when the country was founded. You didn't have California and Nebraska sitting with orders of magnitude of difference between them, so the difference in representation in the Senate was not nearly as significant as it is today.
Wether we need a secondary deliberative body in the legislature or not is a matter of debate and opinion. I can see why you'd want one, but I can also understand why people would think it's not useful anymore.
There's no solution needed, since there isn't a problem to begin with. Individuals (should) have proportional representation in the House, and states have proportional representation in the Senate, which is how it should be.
Yes.
This is funny, it's like an self soothing mantra. I'll try to repeat this to myself as things get worse.
To be fair, Congress wouldn't be so inept if it weren't for the filibuster, which was never intended to be abused the way it is now. I'd be somewhat ok with the Senate if filibusters only required a simple majority to break again.
Beyond what you've stated about the disproportionate nature of the Senate, what exact legislative problems are you attributing to the existence of the Senate, and its disproportionate nature? And why do you think a purely proportional body will solve said issues? I'm also curious what you believe the purpose of the Senate, or a bicameral legislature in general, is.
I'm not trying to be accusatory in my probing, I'm simply curious what your exact rationale is ☺️.
The senate exists to maintain an artificial balance and make sure that only the approved things are actually voted on. That is why popular things like marijuana legalization are never voted on.
What do you mean by "artifical balance"?
What do you mean, exactly? Bills are debated as they are presented [See 7.6 and 8.1 of the Senate Manual].
I don't understand this point. If you want a senator to introduce a bill regarding the legalization of marijuana, then vote in a senator that will present such a bill.
Yup, you don't.
🤡
It is federally legal to prostitution. Just every single state outlaws except nevada.
Interesting, I never really thought about it, but of course that must be true for it to be legal anywhere.
The last one could just be "free education"
Could? I think it should be.
There is a case for having some cost otherwise people go to university for absolutely worthless degrees just to do something.
I would perhaps reword it to something along the lines of "add economic literacy to the public school curriculum".
I’m 90-95% on board, which is astounding considering the current options. Now fleshing out the legislation to make this transition possible…
Exactly my thought. This may as well be a list that has one bullet point "* fix America" without a lot more detail on most of these
Would you have commented on a post that just had an image of "* fix America"?
If it had an opossum and a bright background, it’d fit perfectly in 196.
Mandatory voting just adds semi-random votes, skewing the proportion of people who are really voting for their own interests, but rather out of vibes due to obligation. Holiday on voting days and repealing of disenfranchisement measures work much better.
All the points are nice but the plan does not "make sense" in the sense that it will probably never happen (at least within our lifetimes).
I don't really see "new countries" being a thing in that way ever again. The USA was new because a "new" piece of land was literally found (well obviously it was already found by other people but you get what I mean).
There is no new land to find today. You can't just set off and create a new country - all of the land is already taken. You'll need to work within the confines of the current countries and try your best to improve them gradually.
At least, any other approach would probably be very bloody...
I mean, the US was just a colonial state that broke ties to the british monarchy, and that shit happens all the time, so I think through that method, there's still a pretty good chance. If you're talking more about like, the establishment of the US as a state through the genocide of the native peoples, intentional or otherwise, I'd say, sure, yeah, that's hopefully never gonna happen again, but general independence movements happen all the time.
Don’t worry, World War 3 will leave vast swaths of uninhabited land.
Uninhabitable*
If you arent dying, dont overestimate capitalism's remaining lifetime
Free education.
No private/charter schools.
Religions are businesses and pay taxes.
Ban religious-justified discrimination.
Religion is private between you and God.
Absolute separation between church and state.
Repeal all religion based laws.
I dont understand why Americans are horny for mandatory voting. Voting is mandatory in Greece, it makes no difference. It is theoretically illegal to not vote but are you going to imprison people for not voting? So it isnt enforced, at all.
No one is voting because it is mandatory. Greece has 60% participation.
I believe Australia has mandatory voting and achieves a ~95% participation of registered voters basically every election, though they do enforce it with either a day in court or a fine.
I do wonder if you fined people, or wasted a day of theirs with court, whether it would have an impact in Greece after a couple of elections?
We swing between 93-95% participation
We alao make voting as easy as possible with voting opening 2-4 weeks in advance of election day, election day is always a weekend and as long as you vote before or on election day it's counted.
Also democracy sausages
I think such a high turn out makes our politicians a bit more honest with less empty promises since they can't dissuade anyone from voting.
Right. And for people who try to argue that they shouldn't be forced to choose between people they like like, or whatever, it's important to understand that it is only mandatory to get your name ticked off the list. You don't actually have to submit a valid vote. You can choose to just turn in a blank ballot paper, or write "fuck you" or whatever you like. There are no laws against that.
So the 'mandatory voting' just makes it mandatory to put in the small amount of effort required to show up; but doesn't force you to express an opinion. (Of course, I'd say that you should submit a valid vote. But you don't have to.)
You can not enforce new social norms like that. People, including voting ones, will revolt. They will call it undemocratic and a cash grab. You are just asking for trouble.
I agree many wouldn't bother, but I still believe it should be every citizen's duty to vote. It's literally the bare minimum political involvement people can have.
I wouldnt want idiots having to vote then voting because some friend said some madeup thing or it was the last thing they seen on ticktok. If people don't care and refuse to do the most minimum of looking into politics why should they decide my future
Make it tied to your UBI check. Now it’s incentivized so enforcement not needed.
Yea I think I'll add this to the v4. Incentivize rather than punish. Just give people an extra $100 a month in their UBI for voting.
Why only $100 and not the whole UBI allowance?
Then it’s a punishment of $100 if you don’t vote. UBI as a reward for participating in our democracy would be a great step. A punishment would be a fine or jailtime.
Does your legal system work on imprisonment or nothing at all? Sounds very extreme.
Here it’s a small fine, but it’s also a day off and takes like 20 mins to go do plus you can get a delicious sausage. So it’s a no brainer that people go vote.
Greece is a pretty failed state from what I’ve seen, wouldn’t read too much into what they don’t do.
As for why compulsory voting, it helps moderate extremism and represents most of society as a whole.
People will call it a cashgrab, that will mostly affect poor people(since the rich people both vote and also dont care about small fines).
Greek elections are always on Sunday and people can be given a day off if their voting location is far away(especially back in the day, when moving your voting location was hard).
I have been shitting on Greece for my entire life, but it aint cool when non greeks do it. Yes, Greece is fucked but i wouldnt really call it a failed state. It is a shithole but only greeks get to call it a shithole. It also relatively shitholey, in comparison to western european countries.
It just happens to be the worst "western" country. And yes, it is in the East, but the West/East thing was a Cold War thing and Greece was with the "West". Nowadays, many "eastern european" countries have reached and surpassed Greece.
In any case, take a look at the wikipedia map, which countries have compulsory voting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_voting
If you exclude Australia, all other countries are shitholes. And i am sure australians will be the first to tell you that Australia is also a shithole and politically fucked.
It doesnt. If anything, it might do exactly the opposite. When a greek neonazi party was popular, a lot of "apolitic" greeks supported it not because they supported neonazism but because "fuck the system, at least they will go in and smash some heads". When clueless people are forced to vote, they might be clueless about what they are voting.
America's issue is the first past the post, winner takes all system. If the US had a more representative system, that allowed third parties and coalitions(like almost all other democratic countries have), things would have been better.
thoughts on Selb and Lachat, 2009?:
because you could do literally anything else, and it would be more useful. Mandatory voting is the equivalent to asking everyone in the room what they think about every interaction that ever happens. It's fully redundant.
How tf Americans don't have a holiday on voting day 😭
Ok so..
I think this can get messy. It would require a system to prosecute those who don't vote. That kind of registry can be very easily used for nefarious purposes by politicians or just anyone with access to that information. Also, it would really depend on what degree of mandatory this is. If you get thrown in jail then we are going to see a lot of poor people in prison for no reason. If you get just a fine then we are essentially introducing the inverse of a poll tax. Not voting is a protected form of free speech for a reason and can be interpreted as protest.
Last time something like this was posted I got flamed for asking what the point of this one is. The Senate is a representation of the states rights we have in our constitution. It serves as a safeguard against heavily populated areas dictating the laws for much less populated states. I'm all for reform but eliminating the Senate all together seems like a step backwards.
I think this is another one where the spirit of the idea is right but the execution is wrong. What we need to ban is allowing restaurants to pay tipped positions far below minimum wage, and stop allowing restaurants to take a cut of the tip at all.
The act of tipping itself is a cultural thing that needs to be addressed culturally. If you can't tip someone for something, complications in the law arise that may disallow giving money to people in general. For example how do you distinguish between tipping a server for a meal and giving the server a dollar as a gift?
#1. Truly abolish slavery. #2. Change the legal system from punishment to rehabilitation. #3. Congress gets minimum wage. #4. Minimum wage and unemployment must be a livable wage.
IMPROVE PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION
edit: DST for areas that need it like alaska or new york but not California and others
Yes, that would be included in "Municipalize internet service".
Oh. Right, lol
Yeah except increase taxes on highest income bracket by 65, not 5%.
Remove lobbying.
I don’t like a 15 year term for scotus.
A term limit does make sense, but either in the form of a forced retirement age or a 36 year term. They should also be barred from collecting a wage or benefits from any employer after the end of their term (they should get a damn good retirement package, too).
There are good reasons for SCOTUS to be a life appointment. You don’t want them being bought out with lucrative cushy job offers once they leave. 36 years ensures one appointee per presidential term.
Reverse Harlow V Fitzgerald, that illegally set up Qualified Immunity.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/us/politics/qualified-immunity-supreme-court.html
What about making the highest tax bracket immutable.
Basically, anyone earning more than that amount, for every dollar of earnings above that amount, taxes cannot be exempted, refunded or otherwise redirected.
Say that tax bracket is 500k/yr, and some rich fuck earns 2M. They must pay the tax, whatever percent of tax that is, on the final 1.5M of earnings. So if it's 50% taxes, they must pay $750k, plus whatever taxation is applicable to the first $500k. They can't skirt it by putting that money into a tax shelter or by donating it to the corrupt charity that they run.
You forgot "embrace the metric system".
As someone who hates this God forsaken measuring system, I genuinely don't know if the costs of this would ever be worth it. There'd be thousands and thousands of miles marker signs that'd have to be replaced, not to mention having to redo thousands of textbooks.
Plus, when it comes to some things, imperial is just better. Mostly this is carpentry. 12 is way more divisible than 10 and fractions are way easier for cutting than decimal
It would very much be worth it. Imperial invites mistakes by using weird conversions and factional sizes. I often have to stop and think which factions of an inch are bigger or smaller than each other. When Australia switched from imperial to metric, it's estimated they save about 10% annually from having a lower error rate. Fewer things need to get fixed or replaced from measurement mistakes.
A kitchen-scale example: I once mixed up tablespoons and teaspoons when adding baking soda to my pancake mix. They turned out disgusting and we had to re-make breakfast because version 1 was inedible. Such mistakes are less likely to happen under metric.
Eeeh... We have tablespoon (15ml) and teaspoon (5ml) here too....
The UK did this.
It's absolutely worth it. If you are worried about textbooks staying in circulation for a long time especially in 2024 then you got bigger issues to be honest.
There are also tons of machines and tools made to work in inches. As more things are becoming computer controlled, it's easier to convert between inch and mm on the fly, but every drill bit, end mill, and tool holder for the manual mill in my company's shop is in inch.
I'm also gonna disagree with you on the 12 better than 10 front. Just use a calculator if you can't do it in your head and round to the nearest mm. I bet you'll learn what 10/6 and 10/3 are faster than 12/5 too.
I can actually do all of those in my head, so that wouldn't be an issue for me.
But yeah, all of my tools and bits and holders are imperial, and someone else better be paying to get the damn things replaced or they are staying imperial even if we go metric. I think the only things I have in metric are allans (allens? I've never had to spell it out), like 2 hole saws from an old project, and a set of calipers I was gifted and have used maybe twice
Everyone thinks the the switch would somehow be overnight and everyone would be required to throw away their old stuff. In reality, you just replace the things when they wear out and all the new equipment is metric. Tada!
Can't we just have both, and teach both? But like, in a more committed fashion than we currently do. Probably swapping out road signs and textbooks as they naturally need to be swapped out, to include both sets of measurements and the conversions between them.
But space is so much cooler in the imperial system…
This will be considered for v4 as "Transition to metric system". It would take several years for the transition to completely take place for the average American. I'm also probably going to add "end daylight savings", which is close to being passed anyway.
Legally, we adopted the metric system in the 70s, so more than "a few years" I'd say
fuck you DST FOR THE WIN
Not sure if your list is ordered or not, but I would order it in a way where the top N can be implemented sensibly.
For instance, banning tax preparation companies is a bad idea if you haven't first made the IRS file your taxes for you, but your list had the former above the latter.
Likewise, the voting stuff only makes sense if implemented backwards from how you have it:
Merg Senate in house: no: checks and balances.
What positives would merging them accomplish?
This is the only one i cant figure out.
That person didn't suggest it, it's in OP's list.
There's no benefit to that. Removing the limit on house representatives, that's huge and real, but merging Congress is dumb. There's a few dumb things on the list (eg "abolish gerrymandering" is like saying "abolish speeding"). Choose your favorite!
Edit: Now that I'm not trying to hurry to get ready for work:
Chapter One: the HoRs.
For those that aren't aware of how it works:
There's are two lawmaking bodies with two different purposes. The Senate is equally split among states. There are 2 senators for each state -- as a result, those seats are elected by their entire state (more people voting on each person), and the seats are more competitive (more people want to be elected to that seat). So Senators tend to be more serious politicians, more "universally appealing" (aka centrist). This also makes the Senate the one that gives smaller, or less populous states, more power, because both California and Wyoming get 2 senators, no matter what. These factors contribute to the Senate being a more deliberative body.
The House Representatives are determined by population -- so California has many more senators than Wyoming. They're elected in their district, which can be quite small, so the profile of voters in a district is often very different than in an entire state. (This is why all the crazies are in the House.)
There's a minimum, obviously -- the smallest state will always have at least 1? Or 2? I don't remember. But you can't have a state with no representation, that's not ok.
The problem is, our national population is very very different from what it was. The difference between New York and Maine is much more drastic than it was 200 years ago. But we haven't increased the number of Representatives. And there's a minimum. As the oopulation grows, and the House doesn't, it's becoming more and more unbalanced, in favor of smaller states.
Imagine trying to get smaller states to vote in favor of decreasing their power.
(Also: electoral college votes are on the same system. The electoral college was intended to give smaller states more power, but because there's a minimum, and we haven't reduced the total, it's become super imbalanced. It was a mediocre idea to start with, and now it's even worse. Abolishing the EC is pretty popular, but it might be easier/better to just follow the rules and increase the total number of EC votes. But, again, small states won't agree to it.)
The Constitution says we're supposed to increase the total number of Representatives (and EC votes) but at some point (1929 to be specific) Congress was like nahhhh
Chapter two: why we can't Abolish Gerrymandering.
First of all, it's already illegal.
Secondly, it's hard for outsiders to tell the difference between appropriate "gerrymandering" and actual gerrymandering. If you look at Chicago, where I'm from, there's a weird vote assignment on the west side of the city, it looks manipulated and weird. But if you live here, you know, there's a huge highway that cuts through there that's very hard to cross, so populations on one side are very different from on the other. One side of the highway is there a bunch of Latino immigrants and settled, and on the north side are more affluent (white) people.
(The fact that a highway cuts through a neighborhood isn't an accident, but that's just regular systemic racism, unrelated to Congress.)
If you made the voting map a simple grid, the Latino voters might be split up in a way that reduces their voting power. So the map is weird, but it's actually good that it's weird.
(This is why I said it's like speeding: one, it's already illegal, but two, it's something everyone is doing (and traffic would be super shitty if everyone followed the speed limit), but some people are taking it to an illegal extreme.)
If you look at a state, calculate a percentage of the minorities, and check that number (those numbers -- since there are more than one minority) against the number of districts that vote the way those minorities vote, then, that's what we've decided is "fine" -- and, for real, what else are you going to do.
Illegal gerrymandering is when those blocks of voters ("blocs," is you want to get into Gramsci), are intentionally divided so as to reduce their power. The voting rights act of 1965 made this illegal, and every ten years, after the census, districts are often redrawn. In 2010, we ended up with a lot of gerrymandering. Now,finally, were starting to see some corrections to badly gerrymandered maps, like Alabama, Florida, New York, Wisconsin, Georgia... Louisiana...idr the others, but it's a lot. 2024 is going to have a very very different House of Representatives than the one we have now.
This last point is worth underscoring. The current Republican house majority is due to illegal distract maps. It is, technically, an illegal Congress. So all these ridiculous shenanigans the House Republicans are up to shouldn't be happening. (And, in fact, one could easily make the argument that the high percentage of insane and stupid Republican Representatives is because of the maps -- because the the "depressurization" caused by fair maps would have dialed Congress back to a more centrist stance.
If you want to learn more, check out Democracy Docket, which is a news source from a group of people (lawyers) who are taking bad maps to court.
You have done a good job of beginning to outline why things are going to break rather than change.
I feel like the whole gerrymandering debate is missing the point. Why are our elected officials representing land rather than people? The majority of voters in my district are ideologically opposed to my existence, so they elect people who actively try to harm me. No other representatives are allowed to speak on my behalf because I'm not on their patch of land. I have no one representing my interests in the House of Representatives or my state's equivalent. This will be true for someone no matter how you draw the lines.
It would be better to abolish the idea of districts entirely, and come up with some way to award representatives proportionally.
None you lose thr checks and balance
Checks and balances would be the executive and judicial branches, not the senate.
You think the executive has power? Haha
No senate has powers beyond policy, inquiry committees to reviel corruption ect list goes on. Checks Nd balances
No, that is the original meaning of having three branches, the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. If any of them are not doing their job the other two branches are supposed to hold them accountable (supposed to being the operative term here). I was just saying that the senate was not established as a system of checks and balances against the house of Representatives, but rather as a compromise so that smaller states wouldnt necessarily be completely beholden to one's with much larger populations.
No its their to hold the house to account. The focus of states have and always will be localised.
I'm still on team Approval Voting and Proportional Approval Voting.
I'm on team anything but FPTP. The sane voting vote is split!
Oh no! Let's vote on which voting system to use to vote on which voting system to use. That way our vote about voting won't have vote splitting!
Technically Condorcet method voting is the fairest and least vulnerable to manipulation, but as long as the system works better then FPTP (such as with bonda count) I would be fine with it.
Condorcet is not either of those things but it’s better than some. V321 or STAR outperform all other voting methods by large margins, especially with resistance to strategic voting and manipulation. https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/
Quite an interesting resource. While I can not determine how accurate the simulation is to reality, it appears that the methods you outline are in fact 5% better at dealing with situations with high strategic voting.
Yep, there’s actually another good resource that shows why it’s the case and why IRV is quite terrible (barely better than plurality). I’ll try to find it
Single transferable vote
Tax credit for voting. Make it count like a $50 charitable donation would.
If you're thinking, now, "but then poor people would always vote and rich people would be off sailing their yacht", I completely agree.
Yes. Or even better just cut a check or give cash or equivalent.
No. That's a deduction, and it's worthless for the vast majority of people who have less in deductions than the standard deduction. Also doesn't reduce taxes by the full amount: a $50 deduction would be at most like an $11 credit (or cash) for most people, if it even mattered.
Man, the rich just fucking off away from society would be delightful. Things might actually function in society.
100% on the "lots of missing 'how's" point. You skipped the "ban lobbying" one, which is probably the second biggest "how" after the gerrymandering.
Lobbying is not some official policy or process. Senators don't have "lobbying hours." Lobbying is basically just "being at lunches and parties that politicians are at." Unless you're proposing Congress not be allowed to go out in public and live as secluded monks, I don't see how you "abolish" it..
Yeah I just didn't have it in me and meant to go back for it lol.
We have mandatory voting in Australia. It's "enforced" by a AU$20 fine. Not really a true punishment, more like a nudge. It's more of a societal understanding here, you turn up to a polling place as a civil duty. You can donkey vote if you want, you can draw a cock on the ballot form and invalidate it, doesn't matter. As long as you got your name crossed off, and most importantly had the opportunity to vote, then you're clear. I wouldn't have it any other way, it means that there can't be changes to dissuade people from voting, and politicians don't resort to wildly populist policies to try and encourage people to come out to vote. Also helps that federal elections always occur on a Saturday, and employers are required to give time off in order to vote.
a lot of your questions boil down to “how” and no hate but it’s just funny to witness lemmy discovering what drafting legislation looks like
That's exactly my point. There are people working hard to make these things happen and generally these are very well supported by the public, but without the plan behind them, theres no substance here.
The reason these don't get passed is because of the particulars of implementation. you can't write a bill with the only text being "universal healthcare" without a lot more to it. Once there's a lot more to it, then it gets picked apart and rejected.
What about only allowing investments in broad index funds? But banning trading specific stocks and options could go a long way too.
Those are some good questions.
re: gerrymandering
plausible solution making use of voronoi algorithms
"Collateral for loan is realized gain" targets the "Buy Borrow Die" strategy.
Sure but what's the actual action there? Implementation of a wealth tax? What property counts for that? Is there some other technique he/you are talking about? Taking a loan will now count as income?
Making a loan count as income will mess up legit home purchases. If you went that route it couldn't be that simple.
A big benefit to the buy borrow die strategy is the step up basis for your children. Realizing the gain will move the basis up and cause a taxable event.
I don't know all the details, much less if this plan is perfect, but I think that's the idea.
Maybe removing step up basis is enough, to help reduce generational wealth. IDK
Instead of banning tipping, the law should maybe require to include all costs. This should not just apply to stuff served, but anything.
Banning tipping in restaurants implies that servers would need to be paid a fair wage without needing tips to make up for a lack of wages. Menu prices would incorporate those costs. Tipping in restaurants is the most invasive which is why I chose restaurants specifically.
So instead of banning tipping you mean removing minimum wage exceptions for tipping.
Fwiw a lot of restaurants worldwide are starting to include an obnoxious 12+% "service charge" that can be "removed" if you have a complaint. Basically, enforced tipping that wouldn't be changed by your "ban tipping" plan.
I definitely agree hard with more emphasis on removal of after-the-listed-price fees
Yes, ban minimum wage exceptions and service charges. Also I think taxes should be included on the prices of grocery store items.
you are correct. “ban tipping” is not an actionable platform and leaves too many variables up for abuse.
A commendable attempt at building the foundations of a progressive movement that breaks the current political stagnation we have endured for the past forty years or more.
Unfortunately the majority of people are inexplicably content to be shafted by successive governments whatever their political persuasion.
Id also add the corporations cant own single family housing. Huge penalty for multiple houses.
Ranked choice is quite terrible actually, barely better than Plurality (also known as FPTP). The center for election science has a whole article on it here. https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/
3-2-1 voting and STAR are the best choices, but the CES actually advocates for approval due to logistics and people getting confused by 321 and star.
Yea STAR voting is better, will add to v4, better than the winner take all bullshit we have right now.
what the fuck lmao? where did this come from, genuinely asking this is so authoritarian and out of place among the rest of the stuff
Australia has had mandatory voting for eligible voters (18+) for a long time. It works like this:
Prior to elections, the Australian Electoral Commission updates the electoral roll of all eligible voters. On election day, voters have their names crossed off the roll at whichever polling place they attend.
After the election, the electoral roll is cross-checked against voter records. Anyone who didn't vote and can't provide a valid reason (for example - illness, living remotely, religious beliefs) is issued a $20 fine by the AEC. If not paid, this can escalate to further fines of around $180 plus court costs if convicted.
Over 180,000 penalty notices were issued after the 2022 federal election to enforce the compulsory voting laws. While controversial to some, the system has maintained over 90% voter turnout in Australia for nearly a century.
A similar system would probably moderate political extremes in the US. I think any fine that is used as a means of enforcement needs to be scaled to the means of the individual being fined in order to not disproportionately target lower wealth individuals (but an elimination of the enforcement fine completely for the lower end of the wealth scale would maybe ironically result in less from that group voting and thus give them disproportionately lower representation in outcomes).
if you're going to require voting, give me a good fucking candidate to vote for, for fucks sake. This does nothing to prevent degradation of the candidacy.
thanks for this, provided a lot of insight. for those interested, $20 AUD = $13.06 USD.
i find that this change only might be useful in the US, especially if introduced gradually and after other measures such as a voting holidy (very important!) and vote by mail rather than all-at-once, but i think is less tenable as a position than in Australia due to the following differences:
conclusion: compulsory voting, in my opinion, should not be on this list because it is nowhere near as effective nor feasible as the other election measures already listed.
Nothing screams authoritarianism quite like having to spend 10 mins at a local school on a Saturday, once every couple of years, and drawing a big old big on the ballot paper.
my comment was a genuine question please respect that.
what is the method of enforcement? like if it’s prison, or even time in court. yeah that’s weird and it gives authoritarianism vibes.
if it’s a fine, what is the price point? what about those who cannot afford to travel to vote nor to pay? and what is stopping the wealthy from just paying the fine and skipping elections anyway?
or like what other options of enforcement are there? i just don’t think making voting mandatory is at all needed to ensure free and fair elections and it just has an icky vibe to it.
edit: also you say “every couple years.” are you aware that elections are held several times per year in most parts of the US? or are we just making federal elections mandatory?
edit 2: you say “10 minutes.” when waiting times for voting of 30 minutes or even an hour are not rare. so what is the solution there?
edit 3: what about individuals whose religious convictions forbid them from participating in polls? does this not violate their constitutional rights?
edit 4: doing my due diligence and found that…
…which is cool and admittedly something i was unaware of. nevertheless i still find that the means of obtaining this end questionable.
Proponents of mandatory voting also tend to be supportive of other voting reforms which would make it faster and easier to vote. For example, vote by mail and removing the selective service requirement for men. With some properly implemented reforms, the time it takes to vote could easily be reduced to ten minutes or less.
Mandatory voting would also push the responsibility of ensuring that people have an opportunity to vote on the government, which is really how it should be anyway, but it behooves the powers that be to keep turnout lower. At least in theory, this would obviously need to be codified.
As for religious exemption, I think most mandatory voting advocates would only want to require that every citizen turn in a ballot, but not that it be filled out in any particular way. An objector could turn in a blank ballot or write in a fictitious candidate by that standard. They would have no real sway on the political state, so unless they have a religious objection to filing paperwork they don't have much to complain about. Even so, there could easily be a way to allow people to apply for an exemption.
Your right about punishments being a fraught subject here, though I think everyone's on the same page about them being pretty light. A "realistic" (this whole thread is pretty unrealistic) implementation would probably involve some minor penalty on your tax returns, though personally I'm not happy with that solution.
The point is to push the onus of providing voting opportunities on the government, and increase overall turnout. As I can anecdotally attest, and as you seem to have found on your own, people who don't vote often do have strong opinions. They either don't vote out of laziness or a lack of access. Mandatory voting would fix the former and would necessarily be bundled with legislation to fix the latter.
thanks. i like your framing of putting the onus of voting opportunities on the government. and i think that any good election reform process would implement CV as the last step of a series of careful and intentional change; it doesn’t really fit as one of three “quick fixes” to voting opportunities, hence my initial reaction.
appreciate your response!
I think I have a solution, hear me out: The penalty for missing a mandatory vote is you don't get to vote.
incredible, i agree.
Jail time? Tell me you're American without telling me you're American... I happen to be one of the dozens of people who do not live in the US, so my state and local elections are at the same time, and federal is usually in between. They group them together because efficiency. Pretty sure the penalty in every developed economy is a small fine equivalent to a parking ticket. I don't know exactly, because I've been postal voting for a decade due to my debilitating case of "religious reasons", so I get my ballot in the mail a week in advance, and If I didn't want to vote I'd just mail it back empty (free fyi). I also voted from my phone at a foreign airport one time. Pretty sure I've missed one too, and know several people in their 40's and 50's who've never enrolled, never voted, and never been fined. Turns out "mandatory" is pretty loose when you aren't living in a dictatorship.
The argument FOR mandatory voting is to encourage political parties to reach out and engage all adults (e.g. "we the people"), instead of focusing their policies, campaigning, and financing on specific subsets of the population, or specific geographies (e.g. electoral college), or engage in other methods like voter disenfranchisement, etc, etc — basically to mitigate against the USA's brand of bastardized anti-democracy, and authoritarianism, from happening.
so… mandatory voting for you isn’t actually mandatory voting, it’s in fact a much broader series of measures aimed to reduce obstacles to voting and putting the onus of the election on the government rather than the people. got it, and i like that.
heads up that other comments here swayed my opinion but yours have been truly just disrespectful and unhelpful.
There are probably many ways you could go about this: Requiring that employees have a representative on the board of all corporations, forcing companies to give a certain amount of equity to employees, all businesses have to be worker co-ops, maybe some kind of automatic unionization? The point is to give workers more say in how businesses are run and a fairer cut of the value they produce, which would probably end up fixing some of the other things on this list as a byproduct.
Something needs to be done about deliberate propaganda and misinformation. I'm not sure what the answer is here, but maybe having some rules for what can be called "news" would be a start.
This would cover abortion, prostitution, and marijuana consumption, and would also cover many forms of trans healthcare that are currently under attack. Speaking of which...
I don't agree with merging the House and Senate; uncapping the House fixes the proportionality issue and the Senate is a useful check to ensure that smaller states still have a voice.
Adding 5% to the highest tax bracket seems way too low. There should be a new top bracket with a rate so high it's almost confiscatory; anyone earning that much is a resource hoarder and should be made to share with the rest of society. We used to have a top tax rate of 95%, so this isn't unrealistic.
Banning tax prep is redundant if the IRS is calculating it for you, and I wouldn't want to outright ban it for those whose financial situations may be complicated enough to actually need it.
Why are we including a ban on tipping? I feel like we're getting lost in the details here. This should be a shorter list of high-level changes. If you don't like tipping, wouldn't it be better to do something about employers not giving fair wages in general?
End qualified immunity for law enforcement!
How you gonna afford all the social schemes with no tax under $50K? I have "free" healthcare but it's 2% of my taxable income. The taxable brackets start at $18,200 ($11,880 USD) here. You'll need to ensure there is finance for social services else you'll be bringing harm to your society in the form of failed infrastructure.
Tax the rich
Mainly: "Increase highest bracket tax (+5%)", "VAT for luxury items", "Collateral for loan is realized gain". Universal basic income will put money back into the economy and generate sales tax. Legalizing marijuana will bring in tax revenue when regulated properly, same with prostitution. Universal healthcare will arguably save us money over time.
Taxing 50 thousand people earning $50k at just 1% gets you 25 mil.
Taxing a single billion dollars (of which there are thousands among the top 1%) at 5% gets you twice that.
Bezos' net worth is around 210 with a capital B. Tax just him 5% and you could pay those 50k earners a 210k salary. One guy.
Tax the rich.
And by the way, that 2 trillion dollar tax cut they got from their orange canary god would've paid for the US military budget 3 times and still had enough left over to solve world hunger, educate everyone, and end homelessness.
Whos take home is 1 billion per year?
So sometimes it's a wealth tax, not necessarily an income tax.
Still, the top 10 billionaires are averaging +$40B/yr. Tap that for 5% and that's $21B.
Here's some things you could afford with that money:
And that's just from 10 people, at 5%, one time.
The top 10 billionaires are not increasing their wealth by 40billions a year. So that's wrong.
Why wouldn't they just take all their money out of America and invest in other countries?
Well, the tin-foil-hat answer is because they make more by investing it here, namely, in politicians. (Like Musk bought Twitter in an attempt to control the national discourse, so he could, you know, help influence who gets elected and make more money.)
It's probably just more profitable here. We're a Capitalist nation. Capitalists are gonna wanna play our game. If you had a giant stack of bills in Monopoly, you wouldn't take a bunch of them over to the Chutes and Ladders table.
What do all men with power want? More power.
Oh god. Financial illiteracy and misandry this is everything wrong with Lemmy.
There is tax avoidance and multiple other capitalist countries. Wealth tax will be exceptionally difficult to implement for billionaires.
Were all just dreamers. The solution is out there.
Decommodify housing as well
No employee, owner, shareholder, investor, contractor, etc. can make more than 50 times the amount of the lowest paid employee, contractor, supplier employee, supplier's supplier employee, etc. (Including all of the foreign slaves).
Tim Cook wants to earn 50M per year? Then all of those Foxconn guys that they need nets to stop from suiciding need to make at least 1M. All of the guys making chips have to make 1M. All of the guys mining coal to produce the electricity have to make 1M.
Income inequality problems would be abated. "Dey took our yobs." would be less of a problem because you would save money by using local labor due to lower shipping costs. Poverty would eventually be eliminated.
Probably communism with extra steps, but maybe it would be less prone to party dictators.
Honestly at this point the only thing you are keeping is the English language.
Dude I'm voting for you
dunno how you mandate people vote. the rest looks like an ambitious but overall laudable start.
Australia already does it
A benefit rather than a detriment. Have a benefit offered only to those who have voted in the past election. It could be even paired with the universal basic income, an extra $100 added to your monthly UBI if you are a registered voter who has voted in the most recent election. With universal vote by mail, election day being a holiday, and plenty of early voting days leading up to the election there would be no excuse to not vote.
I'm not sure it would be a good idea, even if it's a benefit instead of a detriment.
Ignorant or apathetic voters with no stake in or care for politics will just vote to obtain benefits without doing any research beforehand. That leads to them either voting for the first person on the ballot or the name they hear the most.
A fewer number of informed voters would be more likely to lead to progressive changes, in my opinion. Uninformed throw-away voters adds noise and introduces a demographic that can be influenced by candidate popularity rather than their policies.
Make UBI entirely dependent on voting. Don’t vote, no UBI check.
Somehow the IRS knows to come after everyone for taxes - they don’t typically miss people. So maybe something somehow like that?
Additionally, no ID renewal without proof of having voted/a valid exception (e.g. out of country)
Ranked choice voting is clearly a better choice than plurality voting, but if you're not familiar with STAR voting, please check it out:
https://www.starvoting.org/star_rcv_pros_cons
https://youtu.be/oFqV2OtJOOg?si=pQ1R3wpPmzOcaO17.
Convert corporations into Worker Consumer Cooperatives to prevent investor wealth accumulation and regulatory capture and align business towards worker and consumer interests rather than short-term profit seeking.
Can you please create a community for this? I'd love to be able to discuss each point separately, and suggest others.
Should also include "tax the church"
I will consider this for v4, although I'm still torn on whether that's a good idea. It would give religious entities a direct reason to influence politics even more. Any good reasons to the benefit other than more tax revenue?
Then better enforce the separation of church and state, to ensure they dont influence politics. I thought the reason they were not taxed was to ensure they didnt influence politics.
They're already influencing politics, and there's nothing being done to stop them. There's no reason to believe that they will stop or slow down.
Yea after more research this is the conclusion I've come to. I think ending the tax-exempt status of religious entities is the best solution to stop the problem.
i think there is potential to do one better and find a more productive solution. start a crackdown, investigate religious entities that are clearly making a profit from rental land. threaten them with removal of tax exemption. investigate institutions that participate in political activity. threaten them with taxes.
if the IRS would start doing this for all the ultra wealthy, this will be a natural antecedent to that process.
i don’t see why it has to be an all or nothing deal, unless i am missing something huge.
Nope, that would be definitely seen as religious persecution. Only way is to equally end all religious tax exemptions simultaneously.
oh sorry there’s another key fact to this, religious institutions are tax exempt under 501(c)(3) in the same way as all other charitable organizations.
so going after “religious organizations” already means you are going to have to define which 501c3s are “allowed” or not—and unfortunately there’s a lot of crossover of semi-but-not-really religious groups. so any attempt at un-tax-exempting churches is going to look like persecution to some because the line is going be drawn somewhere. think of yoga or mindfulness studios, plenty of which are 501c3. are they religious? well, yeah, often. all of them? certainly not. so how do you choose? in any raw “tax the church” scenario you end up litigating what consitutes “religious” or not—which looks like ( and arguably might be) proto-persecution.
so, investigate the profit. publish the documents showing a church breaking its 501c3 requirements. give them 180 days to knock it off or something, then tax them like the rest of us. you’ll probably also catch some non-religious 501c3s doing shady stuff as well—and all the better.
hope this makes sense.
edit: i guess the other assumption i made is that we don’t want to just… tax all non profits. i hope we both can agree that would be shitty lol.
edit 2: ok you don’t make that assumption, so there we go.
They shouldn't be tax exempt either. If they generate profit, they should pay tax on it. Subsidies are used to benefit specific activities, and they are easier to investigate for fraud as to whether the subsidy is spent as intended.
The sheer amount of land they would have to sell off to be able to pay their taxes would drive prices down for houses and farms. The LDS own something like 850,000 acres or something of just farm land. People could build affordable housing or just housing in places increasing supply.
It all starts with the top - proportional representation.
It still amazes me that states have those proposition votea/referenda started by petitions and yet there isn't a movement to get proportional representation on the ballot? Or if there is it seems pretty quiet from outside the US.
Honestly, along those lines, I don't think we (Americans) will get anything until we get rid of the electoral college and the Senate.
Why would a two party system implement ranked choice if everyone is stupid enough to keep voting for them? They're not going to shoot themselves in the foot.
That's the issue isn't it
the problem is that we have to vote, one of the two of them is going to get into office, that's just how it works. Ranked choice would likely involve repealing that as well.
If people aren't voting is that a protest or apathy? How would you tell?
doesn't matter, it's the same problem, neither of those people are confident in the governments ability to lead.
A vote for third party is a vote for Democracy
The instant run-off is the middle-ground solution. It still benefits the 2 major parties, but it eliminates the Spoiler-effect.
My favorite modern example of the spoiler effect was the 2006 Texas Governor's race, which had a double-spoiler.
Rick Perry was being challenged by Democrat Chris Bell, Independant Kinky Friedman, and Carol Strayhorn - anohlther Republican.
Strayhorn split the Republican vote, spoiling Perry's majority. But then Kinky grabbed a lot of the liberal voters, so Perry still won.
MANDATORY voting... Let's be real, we have people who are unable to read the candidates' personal statements, you really want them voting?
That'll be used to get President Camacho legislating Mandatory plant watering using Gatorade.
So, some of these are great. And some of them are so unrealistic they will NEVER happen in a trillion universes. I don't think it's healthy or productive to conflate great talking points with this crud because it just devalues the argument as a whole.
eh.. is there a reason why "abolish slavery" happens to NOT be on that list? i'ld put it right on top!
Not necessary, already solved with the 13th amendment. This is a list of solutions which have not yet been implemented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
Slavery is still legal in prisons.
Oh fuck all that shit. I'll add "ban private prisons and penal labor" to v4.
which part of "except as a punishment" was actually unclear in those laws that currently still "protect" slavery since how many centuries now? did you already ask your gov how many are enslaved due to this slavery protection law today? do you know how many are today tortured because slaves still do not have any laws protecting them? tell me which laws you think would protect slaves today from torture? could they call a lawyer? by which law if they dont have rights? this "don't have rights" was a huge part of slavery, right? so tell me, as this law clearly states the possibility of slaves, which laws would protect them? how could you tell if there are no other mentionings in any other law? i guess you just can't, because this law protects slavery but no law protects the victims of it.
so if you did not ask your government yet about the total numbers (which could be 0 of course as you claim), on what "knowledge" are your believes based on then? pls let me know!
i remember news about children put into cages at the southern border, i remember that originally a five digit number of families was in the news, later on claims, that those kids were sexually abused instead of beeing taken care for, they tried to find them but only got a low 4 digit number of them back. what would you say happened to those at "unknown locations"? i do see a "possible" direct link to the slavery-protection by law you seem to believe would actually "prohibit" it.
Just having this exception in the laws degrades the credibility of the whole country. Why not get rid of this shit then?
And thus if you were right that slavery does not happen any more (wow cool, a real step towards civilisation) then it should also not be of any problem of any kind to remove that exception from the laws right today before sunset, right? who would even hesitate?? if there are none who currently "profit" from that law, or who are already planning to profit from it by creating false evidences of "crimes" sufficient to apply this laws to innocent ones in front of some of those "secret courts", if none of such exists, why not just remove this exemption then and if only to really have more civilized law afterwards ???
IMHO "abolish slavery" needs to be on that list, so this list could have any meaning at all.
Are you trying to fix systemic problems of government structure or pass laws? They are different things.
Wow man you must be reading my mind. Was actually working on a website to do something like this with civil discussion. There are a ton of things missing to this list but it's a good base line.
Edit: website will include the milestones required to complete each change including why important and potential impact, negative and positive, and difficulty of task.
I think the actions on this list would improve economic conditions for the middle class.
I’ll just say if prostitution is legalized, then there needs to be something that ensures that someone isn’t coerced into it somehow, or sex trafficked into it.
Start with one thing, mate. Most impact and easiest to implement.
Why delude yourself with this bullshit fantasy list? Focus on reality.
While I agree with tackling one problem at a time, there's no issues with listing all of them. Then, when you tackle one, you get to mark it off.
There's something great about an easily comprehendible list that everyone can understand.
Pretty sure this is ranked by biggest impact to smallest
Yeah, in order to have the slightest chance of doing most of these things, America would already have to be a lot better.
Keep the faith, citizen. These things just take time, but change does happen.
I focused on reality and all it did was make me start thinking we're fucked, so I made a list of solutions.
When you propose things, you have to keep some line items you can remove easily during negotiations to show “good faith” 😬
"What? Fly?!? If Man could fly, they'd have wings!" /bahhumbug
No. You keep treating the symptoms.
Sure, but be careful with "universal basic income" ,"taxes" and actual national expenses.
What you have there is a wish list. It's a good wishlist, but an actual plan requires planning. Including how the math works out. Which can be done, but you still need to do it.
Thank you for this approximate description of most Nordic countries.
Making election day a holiday probably won't have the effect you're hoping for.
Best case: Almost everybody goes to work as usual. A few of them get a pay differential for working the holiday.
Worst case: Holiday means holiday. We'll give all bus drivers the day off to vote -- and hope the bus riders live within walking distance of their polling location.
In Australia we use local primary schools as voting places. I have always walked to vote.
Also lots of people do work on election day, we offer heaps of time to vote before the day if you can’t get off for an hour to vote.
Extremely best case: everyone votes by mail early so no one has to rush and struggle to vote on election day.
Mail voting is great. I used it with no problems, even though I still had classes on election Tuesday.
How do you ensure that the vote is secret if you vote by mail?
Edit: would the downvoters care to explain what's wrong with my question?
It's already illegal to open other people's mail. Intercepting mail in the US is a really quick way to get absolutely fucked by the law. There haven't been any cases of people's votes being recorded as far as I've searched. What more would you want?
Who counts the votes? That person knows.
An online voting system would be great. Keep the in person, just allow online as well, election locations all the sudden are not busy at all and online is easy access.
Online votes would be insanely easy to adulterate. No computers should be involved. Paper ballots.
Paper ballots are insanely easy to adulterate. No paper ballots should be involved. Computer based ballots.
Har har
You could just vote on Sundays, it's what we do in Austria.
I think in the US they all have to work on sundays too
Yea, instead of a holiday just vote by mail. The state gives you like 10 days to send in your ballot. So easy.
it would be trivial to allow bus drivers and other essential workers to take half days in order to both vote and staff essential services.
and, as OP pointed out, vote by mail can also exist and be encouraged. it’s simply not as black and white as you are framing the situation.
5% tax on highest bracket not nearly enough. Normal citizens pay like 30%, they should reduce the normal bracket to somewhere around 10-15 percent, raise top bracket to about 49%, and tax businesses at the same rate.
Can you explain what you mean by this?
Functionally how would that work? Maybe I'm being obtuse here, but it sounds like a Catch-22.
Currently what billionaires do is never sell their assets so that they never have to pay capital gains tax (since they haven't realised the gain), but then take out large loans using those assets as collateral and live off the loans. That allows them to enjoy the benefits of their capital gain without ever paying tax on it.
The line you quoted is saying that if you use some asset as collateral for a loan then for tax purposes that should count as realising any gains in value
Under the current system, i think we'd call these interest only loans. It only works in a scarce resource situation that drives cost. And we do exactly this to eliminate private mortgage insurance, a debt to equity ratio.
It has no chance of becoming a reality without the help of moderates and liberals who have made it very clear they would rather lose to MAGA than compromise with leftists and progressives.
People have yet to acknowledge the first implications of this. If we believe the numbers of progressives and leftists are growing there will come a time when we begin winning primaries but will lose general elections consistently because moderates and liberals suddenly won't "vote blue no matter who". Which means fascism isn't just a possibility, it's guaranteed.
If moderates and liberals don't make different choices there's nothing we can do.
You could have just stopped there. Every item on this list is antithetical to the interests of the people who rule us.
It bears mentioning why. Liberals and moderates are holding us back from addressing fascism.
I’ve sort of come to the conclusion that the spirit of the times has turned toward chaos and away from stability. These sorts of vague political commitments no longer have the power to avert the disaster we’re facing. We are fully in the grip of vast, impersonal historical forces again, and just have to see what happens.
Needs more limitations on investment in the stock market, more investment into co-ops and employee owned businesses, and more investment into rail infrastructure and other good civic infrastructure at the federal level. Also, change from general ranked choice voting, to the schulze method.
Also I wanna see a real move towards taco tuesday. We think it's a meme or whatever, but like an experimental free food day, or free single meal, for at least one day a week, seems totally achievable, and like it would do some good. Maybe try to integrate some community gardening into it or something, set up some federal system for that, that would be fucking sick dude hoo lee.
Edit: If you're getting rid of states, or like, trying to rethink them, I think I remember seeing some maps redrawn with states if they all had totally equal population, which you could do, and I've also seen some maps that allocate states based more on natural resources, than just having like, a lot of the western states be shitty squares and stuff. I think I saw one based on water tables, but I can't seem to find it or remember the name of it. You'd probably wanna go in for stuff like that, if you wanted to still retain the idea of states, and give them a reason to exist but also be fair and not lame.
How about age limits for government officials as well? Or at least the senate. The grandma at the tax form place in city hall is ok even if she a bit slow.
Legalize all drugs. Keep prices low(street value) with quality monitoring paid for by tax of product. Any further tax revenue from product to be used for addiction treatment.
It’s all wishful thinking, but certainly makes sense within the context of a suggestion to improve our QOL.
You could pay for a whole bunch of that with a Land Value Tax.
Writing "Abolish PACs and lobbying" implies reverting Citizens United v FEC so you probably don't need a separate list item for it
Again, replace the senate with proportional representation. Bicameral legislatures work, there's no reason to be rid of the senate. Just give it a purpose beyond "you represent a state". Expand the senate to 600 seats, National votes for party reps, 0.5% threshold to gain a seat, 6 year terms, rotate every two years. Then we'll get actual third parties into office, which will break up the two party strangle hold.
I am actually not sure about the coroprate home ownership point. Here in Germany renting is much more common and accepted compared to the US, and i think there are lots of situations where this makes sense. However both in the US and here in Germany the systems need changes. And i think they should mostly target land ownership rather than the houses themself. What drives up the prices in desired areas are mostly increases in land value, not that building houses got that much more expensive (although that is also a factor).
And most of that value gain are from external factors rather than the owners own merit. If someone builds an architectually great and energy efficient house or develops land, then it is fine if he gains value from it. But if simply owning the property improves the value over time, because society around it builds nice schools, parks and so on. Then the owner hasn't done anything and that profit should be taxed completely away. If that makes sense.
That said there probably should also be a mechanism to support the first home people own to counteract scale efficiencies that corporations might be able to leverage.
Not sure if outright banning stocks for politicians is the way to go, but there should be more points regarding transparancy and conflicts of interest. Also not just during their time in office, but after that aswell.
I'd have no issue with politicians holding a borad market index fund.
Three the most important things are missing:
Most of the changes won't matter if people are uneducated or easily misled.
The America patch notes of our dreams
Just dont call it by its real name and muricans are ok
I'd suggest a "universal basic income" be labelled something like "American Citizen Permanent Fund" or something like they did in Alaska with the "Alaska Permanent Fund".
Seize the means of production and call it "freedom eagle burguer act" and everything is fine
Mostly. I'm fine with some of these being left up to the states, like prostitution and marijuana, although I do think marijuana's federal status should change (from schedule 1, to a much lower schedule). Also, I think the highest tax bracket should be 99%, or even 100%. But that highest bracket should be a very high number, like 0.001% of GDP.
I would add:
Equal Rights Amendment
Reverse Shelby County v Holder
Reverse District of Columbia v Heller
Add ethics code for Supreme Court with enforcement authority
Discharge federal student loan debt and regulate higher education costs
Demilitarize police
Ban property tax based school funding
Abolish the death penalty
Federally mandated paid vacation, paid sick leave, overtime over 40 hours, and a ban of right-to-work laws.
Allow the Army Corps of Engineers to repair and maintain infrastructure.
Limit the age for candidates, to the pension maximum
Legalizing Prostitution just creates more Human Trafficking, as a result of allowing human traffickers to operate in the open under the guise of legality. We have decades of evidence that lead to this conclusion. We don't need to keep trying it.
I agree. However, I'm curious exactly what type of ranked voting system you would advocate for — Instant Runoff, Single Transferable Vote, etc.
I disagree. The right to vote also encompasses one's right to not vote. Even if one ignores the freedom aspect of it, an argument could be made that mandatory voting would actually have a negative effect: forcing people to vote, who otherwise wouldn't've, will likely cause them to choose whomever they are the most familiar with — essentially, this means that the person who can afford the most advertising is the most likely to win. Furthermore, as pointed out in this comment, there are potential privacy risks associated with tracking voters.
I disagree. There is too much potential for abuse.
I agree.
I agree — granted, I would legalize all drugs. However, I'm of the opinion that selling it to minors should still be illegal. I've also been considering the idea that any entity that wants to engage in the sale of addictive substances must also provide, proportional to their sale volume, rehabilitation centers. There would also need to be strict regulation, such as there is with the sale of food, on their production, and composition.
I agree. Of course, this would then mean that prostitutes would be entitled to the same employee protections, and rights as anyone else.
I'm not very familiar with this court case, so my answer isn't thoroughly thought out, but, if I understand it correctly, that ruling overturned a previous ruling that prohibited some forms of election spending. If so, I would agree with such a ruling — I believe that people have the right to spend their money where they see fit. It is the voter's duty to determine whether the person should be elected.
I disagree. I'm not sure I understand your rationale behind this one. Why don't you think this should be allowed? As long as the land-value taxes are being payed, the people are being justly compensated for the ownership of that land.
I haven't come to a firm decision on this matter. Would you mind elaborating on your rationale?
While I agree with the sentiment that gerrymandering is bad, what would you suggest should be done to "abolish" it?
I disagree (I don't disagree with the idea that filibustering is bad. I disagree that it should be prohibited). It is the duty of the voters to hold their representatives to account.
I disagree (from the perspective of the U.S. Congress). I would like to know your rationale for why you want them merged. The intent of a bicameral legislature is to act as a sort of "check and balance" on new legislation — it plays an important role in a federation. Do you disagree that this is the case? If so, why?
I've never thought about this. I'm inclined to agree. I can't think of, nor can I find, any good reason for why there is a cap beyond the arbitrary.
This a tricky one. I'm not yet convinced that it is as cut and dry as many people make it out to be — there are many caveats. I, at the very least, am strongly inclined to favor a hybrid system. There are also certain circumstances where a free market is simply not compatible (e.g. emergency departments).
While I understand the rationale that it would effectively cover one's right to life, I have economic concerns. Primarily, I am concerned that it would lead to runaway inflation. I have considered other options like breaking down the necessities for life into categories and apportioning them equally (e.g. foodstamps). I have not yet come to a conclusion on this matter.
I'm more of the thinking that income taxes should be abolished.
...why? I suppose there is some lobbying risk, but, beyond that, I don't understand this one. However, even if there was lobbying risk, they are within their rights, imo.
This may only be possible for simple taxes. Anything more complicated than simple income tax would not really be feasible, I think. Also, it is important to note that the IRS does already offer this, to an extent. I could be mistaken, though. In all honesty, I think the solution is to just simply taxes, rather than trying to obfuscate away their unnecessary complexity. This, most likely, will just lead to more bloat, and money wastage.
Generally, I would disagree with the implementation of a VAT. The only tax on products that I would support is one that is in the form of compensation to the public for damages (e.g. environmental taxes).
I'm not certain on the exact number, but I am in favor of the idea of term limits for non-elected officials.
Again, I'm more in favor of abolishing income tax.
I don't understand the rationale for this. Would you mind elaborating?
This is similar to the point about Citizens United v. FEC. It is the voter's job to hold elected officials accountable.
I think this is sort of missing the point. What you're effectively getting at is that insider trading should be illegal, which it is. The real question is why the SEC, or related government agencies in other countries, doesn't seem to go after some people when it seems obvious that they are engaging in insider trading.
Hm. I'm generally against adding any more government bloat unless absolutely necessary. One of the main issues with how ISPs are structured is that they somewhat currently function as an monopoly — due to intrinsic factors. This is the main reason, in my opinion, why prices are high, and why the service is often bad. Intrinsic monopolies are a tough issue to solve. I'm not sure that creating a government run ISP would make the problem any better. If anything, it might actually get worse. A cooperatively owned ISP may work, though.
This will always be a tricky issue. In my opinion, both sides of the debate have fair arguments. The main question is "whose rights trump whose?" Is it the baby, or the mother? Whichever one that one chooses, I would like to know their rationale. It is not an easy question to answer, imo. It most likely will always lie more in the realm of philosophy than in hard fact, which, of course, doesn't lend itself well to legislation. If I were pushed to side with a group, I would most likely side with the mother.
I disagree. That being said, I certainly would like for tipping culture to die. It is not my job to ensure that an employee is payed well — that is between them and their employer.
I'm more in the camp of wholly restructuring how education is done, but that is out of the scope of this comment. I agree that economic literacy is important, but my beliefs on the matter of education go far beyond only that — I believe that we need a fundamental restructuring of the education system.
not sure about the mandatory voting and outlawing tipping. Just compliance wise. Not voting itself can be a intended thing and I can't think of any country where you have a gun to your head to vote taht is a place I would want to live. As for tipping you will just turn it into bribery. No place should be allowed to pay with the expectation tips is part of compensation. Tips are a gift basically.
You have about 25 items too many on this list.
Can someone explain to me what "collateral for loan is realized gain" means?
UBI requires such a large reorganization of the economy that you may as well add democratization of the workplace, and it would get done earlier. I think both would be great personally.
Excellent project OP, this is cool
Mandatory voting I dunno.
The rest are definitely good, I'm thinking just having a whole ass revolution might be easier than getting all this done, and as a bonus would come with additional benefits.
If it can possibly be done without a revolution, that is by far the better and easier choice.
Revolutions are messy, difficult, a great time for power seekers to consolidate power and eliminate the competition, and in the history of mankind, most of them have not resulted in positive change.
They are extremely dangerous, and should never be considered anything other than an absolute last resort when nothing else has any hope of working anymore.
Famine is probably a good indicator of when the situation is bad enough for a revolution to be a potentially rational choice. If significant portions of the population are in danger of famine, then it may be time for a revolution. We are quite far from that point still, fortunately.
And new or returning challenges
I like a lot of your proposals,but I don’t think they will fix everything. Certainly an improvement though.
I don’t think the supreme court changes would fix issues with the court, and I think a 15 yr. limit could make it worse.
Each presidential term would get 2-3 nominations per term, allowing them to establish a majority if elected for 2 terms. Considering how powerful the court is, allowing a president to establish a majority simply by being in office for 2 terms isn’t great.
Increase the seats to correspond to the number of federal districts, currently 13.
How about a wall around the crazy states, everyone can go and come for some years, after that, close it. Let them drown in guns and bubbles, I say. - a joke, apparently. I like the list, maybe fight all the cults where old guys marry several underaged girls, too. Oh yeah, they still exist.
Maybe I will add "Revoke Scientology tax-exempt status" in v4.
Revoke all religions tax exemption
careful lol i recognize this is a joke coming from a good place probably but this is verging on a fascist talking point. trans people being abused by the florida government and children being murdered in texas schools have a right to safety, not to be simply ignored with the opportunity to abandon their home in a few years.
Perhaps this is just my European wallet talking, but $50k/y income = rich people. I'm sure there are states in USA where this is also true.
That sort of a change would totally crash tax income?
Add political appointments can be recalled by the voters.
You forgot to add abolishing slavery.
Considering that lemmy.world is pretty much just a ball of pearl-clutching white liberalism these days it's not very surprising.
Yeah, I could get behind 90% of this. Find me that candidate/party and I would vote for them!
I’d personally abolish the senate and leave the house alone, or change the house to one rep per every x number of people instead of whatever we do now.
mandatory voting is not something i agree with.
The house and senate should both exist, they both serve a purpose. The senate gives every state an equal footing, the house gives every state representation in regards to population, so they both serve a very explicit purpose.
idk about house rep cap. There are already so many, perhaps improve the makeup of the reps though? That's pretty messy.
on the supreme court term limit, include an age limit as well.
That's it, everything else would be fine probably?
Stop I can only get so erect
One thing I’ve been mulling over is “tax stock dividends at source.” So if a company is paying out dividends to stockholders, there’s no hiding it, the tax to the IRS is paid up front.
Maybe abolish slavery? Perhaps actually honor treaties with indigenous people?
I like where you're going here, and the only things I disagree with are the Senate merge and Electoral College as these still serve a purpose. The removal of the House cap will rebalance there, and if anything the Senate could be reverted from popular election back to being appointed by the State Legislatures so they rebalance back to being actual actors for the State as intended vs overpowered Representatives.
The Electoral College helps balance democracy being 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner, but maybe get some math experts to review the equation for apportionment and/or set all electors to be proportional to the vote percentages in every state.
I’m happy if the mail comes on time. I don’t think the government could properly manage these broad sweeping programs especially with radical changes to the legislative and judicial branches and elections.
Nor do I think you’d be able to get the states on board with this much radical change. Everything sounds ok on a surface level but rather than thinking pie in the sky, pragmatism would be needed on just the most important issues such as a universal health plan or education plan
IRS filing taxes for us could lead to unintended consequences, like them just saying "yep, everything's in order here. you're all paid up. What's that? Tax return? No, you paid the exact amount you owed in taxes, so you get no return." and probably you'd have to do a FOIA request to get a copy of the return, then you could probably fight it, but it'd cost more to fight it than you'd get back in the return in the first place.
Most countries that do this send an itemized tax bill showing how everything adds up and you are given time to dispute it before paying.
oh that's kinda cool then.
I believe most Americans don't realize that this is possible, thanks for mentioning that. This is how it should be in the US as well.
I'd rather focus on ripping cars out of cities, promoting mixed use zoning areas, removing regulations on food service (which is the reason small American food vendors need food trucks, instead of "street food" like the rest of the world.
The disjointed, car based, child hating society we have is a big problem.
What's wrong with filibuster?
mandatory voting is dumb
Why, you can just code for no one.
so find a solution that is sharp on neither side and checks itself. here is one.
Yea an algorithm which requires the edges of the district to be of some equal distance from the center would be a start on gerrymandering.
I would love most of these to be implemented. But I wouldn't want the Senate to be merged because of separation of powers. Better to have a mandatory retirement age or term length for all politicians.
Also, I would like every law that has been and will be enacted by the Senate, that only affects the Senate and other positions of power, to be voted by the people in a popular vote. This way corruption by conflict of interest wouldn't happen so blatantly like it has in the past.
If you really think two bodies is better you can still have be proportional to people not states.
Remove daylight standard time.
Remove "drive in empty lane" language from DMV instruction.
These two things would have near universal impact on US culture.
*amendment requiring DST
Abolishing corporate ownership is stupid. What does that even achieve?
If you trying to fix the housing market this is completely the wrong way to go about it. The issue is the value of the land isn't correctly valued. Things like LVT, density minimums (increasing with population growth), good rail links again with dense redevelopment near the stations.
Things like this will fix the housing market.
Unless you worried about landlords being dicks you just need better laws. Like what are you actually trying to achieve? I don't get it.
Prostitution will just objectify women
Would make more sense if abortion was banned except in circumstances where the mother's life is in danger or rape
People who dont want children should not have one. It is that simple. You want less abortions? More education and cheap and available contraception is the way. People won't magically want to have more kids if you force them to birth one.
I agree with you. It's got nothing to do with increasing birth rates. We should increase the education of contraception as well.