Not American, but I would add some severe roadblocks to anything that makes basic housing an "investment".
Here here.
FYI, it's "hear, hear" as in, hear this, hear this.
Why would you merge the Senate and the House, especially in the direction of the House? The Senate, being a statewide race, has a tendency to attract moderates as they need to appeal to a much broader group. The House, being significantly more local, more easily allows extremist views on both sides of the aisle. Expanding the seats and ensuring representatives represent roughly equal number of constituents as each other will itself go a long way.
The term limit of SCOTUS seems low. That almost syncs with a double run of a president allowing some to get potentially multiple appointments while others get none. That leaves the stability of the court left in some part to chance. Expanding the courts and setting the term limit in a way that each president generally gets an appointment per term would help deradicalizing the courts.
There should probably be some incentive to actually encourage domestic job production. In a global economic environment without such incentive there will continue to be job losses and even with UBI an unnecessary burden will increase over the years. That can threaten stability and lead to cutting life saving services. A CCC program can help a lot, but we also need private industry to seek domestic labor more broadly.
Municipalize infrastructure and health production. The government should actually own some factories and produce goods itself rather than the bloated bidding contractor stuff.
Don't let public employees leave their positions only to be immediately hired back as a contractor at a much higher rate. If you want to work for the public sector, work for the public sector.
Pay public sector workers (including academia) enough to allow people that actually want to pursue those careers to live comfortably and to entice more people to transition into those careers.
Fund education for all for as long as they want it. Educating your populace means you will have a more skilled and more innovative workforce which will lead to better outcomes for everyone.
Significantly reduce copyright protections. They should not let anywhere near a lifetime, and they just serve to hamper derivative innovation.
Here’s my Supreme Court fantasy:
Every president appoints one justice, but only in their second term if reelected. Fuck cares how many justices there are at any given time.
Here’s the catch: There’s no term limit and technically no age limit… but in order to qualify, any nominee must have served at least 20 years as a federal judge and have another 15 years in the legal system (as a judge, attorney, whatever), for 35 years total experience. Oh and they should have a law degree, since that’s not a requirement right now lol.
This way you get someone with a judicial record to consider at confirmation hearings, and make sure they’re incidentally old enough that they’ll die or retire relatively soon in case they turn out to be fucking horrible.
You missed a very important one, fix the main reason billionaires don't pay any tax:
Using your unrealised gains (e.g. shares) as collatoral to take out loans should be considered realising those gains and thus subject to capital gains tax
And while we’re at it, let’s take into account the total wealth of your stock holdings when you realize gains. There’s no reason poor and middle Americans should pay the same tax on their capital gains as billionaires.
Oh god yes
Income up to $50k untaxed.
I wouldn't set a hard number value for this. Make it based on how low income is defined, or something dynamic that can change over the years with inflation.
For example, in parts of California you could be making $80k and you would still be considered low income because of how expensive it is just to live there. After paying for housing, there won't be much left over.
At minimum, tie it to inflation. But better yet, tie to cost of living and housing prices in a district.
There are no financial reforms on this wish list, which are necessary to make these other reforms stick:
The lobbying one is prickly. Hiring an advocate for groups like homeless people, charities, minorities, protected classes, etc. may be a necessary evil to help ensure that people are heard out. At the same time, it leaves the door wide open for anyone with big piles of money to do the same thing. I suppose we could say that a repaired election process would provide all the coverage we need, but then we're probably back to "tyranny of the majority" arguments. I'm not saying it's solvable, but clearly something should be changed.
Actually pretty close to the Electoral College part. The National Popular Vote currently has 205 EC votes across 16 states, it would need at least 65 more to go into effect at which point there would never be an outcome different than the national popular vote winner becoming president ever again.
Examples of presidents who lost the popular vote:
Donald Trump - Margin 2,868,686 (−2.10%)
George W. Bush - Margin 543,895 (−0.51%)
Benjamin Harrison - Margin 90,596 (−0.79%)
Rutherford B. Hayes - Margin 254,235 (−3.02%)
John Quincy Adams - Margin 38,149 (−10.44%)
For anybody wondering who won against Bush in the Good Timeline, it was Al Gore. The guy who realized Climate Change was an existential threat to us all back before the ice caps started flooding the atmosphere with methane.
It hurts to see you have to explain the Bush v Gore stuff. I was a kid but I remember living through it pretty vividly.
I would add, "abolish gerrymandering," at the top of that list. I'm not entirely sure how, "merge Senate into the House," would work, but I think that's probably a bad idea.
Some people complain about the the Senate because it gives each state 2 Senators, so less populace states have outsized power, but that's kinda the point. It may not seem very fair, but neither is the 5 most populace states voting to strip mine the Midwest, which is the kind of thing the Senate is meant to be a bulwark against. The Senate does put too much power in the hands of too few, but I think a better way to fix that would be to take away the Senate's power to confirm appointments and shorten Senate terms, not abolishing it or, "merging it into the House," (though again, I'm not entirely sure what that would entail, so maybe it would work).
Don't forget mandatory voting.
Making everyone vote even if they don't really care means that working your supporters up into a frothing rage doesn't work. They're already all going to turn up. If you want to actually win elections, you suddenly have to win over the middle.
If you do that, make sure it's a guaranteed public holiday or have laws in place to ensure workers can get time off to vote.
It has more advantages than just the ones you describe, although even that alone is good enough reason to do it.
It also forces the government to make voting easy. To put them at a time when a maximum number of people can make it (in Australia elections are on a Saturday, when most people are not working—prepoll is also extremely easy to do they just ask you if you're unable to vote on election day, without requiring any actual proof, and postal voting not much harder than that). To have numerous places to vote within easy access of where everyone is.
Supreme Court should be subject to ethics laws and rules, not exempt from them
Missing:
Disallow corporate campaign donations
Politicians prohibited from owning stocks
You're missing some voting reform, but full props for putting voting reform at the top of the list.
Some suggestions:
I have a few to add.
Gerrymandering eliminated nationally with mathematically randomized district maps with approval required by all major parties and a non-partisan committee, not just the majority party. If no map can be agreed upon, the non-partisan committee gets final say.
(This is more of an amendment to the elimination of the electoral college one...) States do not vote for president, people do. And no person's vote should matter more or less than another because of the state they live in. Therefore, the person elected president is the one who wins the popular vote nationwide.
The sectors of medicine, pharmacy, education, produce, and communications (cellular and internet) should always have well-funded state providers in the same competitive space as any private option. No part of the nation should be without access to any of these public services in a reasonable distance.
Abortion is added as a constitutionally protected right.
An exact definition to the limits on the executive power, privileges and protections of the President.
Ethical rules for Supreme Court Justices with an oversight process (with teeth) to enforce them, with consequences ranging from mandatory recusals for conflicts of interest, to removal from the bench.
Single purpose bills without any tagalong laws attached to them only.
No bill should be brought to vote until enough time has passed since its publishing that both members of congress and the public have had time to thoroughly read and discuss its contents.
A naming convention for bills that does not allow for names that are blatantly attempts at misleading, meant to evoke emotion, or just marketing gimmicks and "clever" acronyms. No more "P.A.T.R.I.O.T.", "Stop W.O.K.E", or "D.R.E.A.M." acts.
A pathway to cutting the military budget to a fraction of what is is today. Maybe a 10 percent reduction in budget each year for 8 years?
MORE PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION
Removing the house rep cap (more particularly adopting a plan similar to The Wyoming Rule) would be a fantastic idea and allow the house to return back to what it should be, populace representation. As the electoral college is based on combined reps and senators, this also does a fair bit towards resolving the underlying issue there.
Corporate personhood is what allows you to sue a corporation and enter contracts with it. Removing it would not be the best idea with that in mind. The courts have allowed that to go further then it should vis a vis allowing contributions to political campaigns etc. Revert Citizens United and we're largely good.
if one allowed the IRS to file taxes for citizens you wouldn't need to ban tax prep companies since the amount of people buying their products would fall off a cliff.
The 10 year term limit for the Supreme Court is trouble. With 9 justices, one party in power for 8 years, which happens often, is more than enough to ideologically set the tone.
I don't mind term limits per se, just not such a short limit.
Police reform. Abortion protection. Web neutrality. Data privacy. Gender affirmative care protection. Legalized weed. Minimum wages tied to inflation, on top of UBU. If we're getting crazy.
I'd be okay with keeping the senate. I think the founding fathers had a good idea, Senate was meant to be more "Long term sustainability" while the House was meant to deal with the needs of now.
However, Term Limits. They didn't see senators sitting on their seats until they were over 90 years old. In their day if you made it to 40 you were apparently doing really well.
i think one small addition
Rather than abolish the Electoral College and merge the House and Senate, I would suggest massively increasing the size of the House. This would increase the size of the Electoral College too, reducing the distortion of the population while still protecting less populous states. This also has the advantage of being something that can be done through ordinary laws instead of Constitutional amendments.
I think literally all you need is ranked choice voting and the abolishment of corporate personhood and for profit lobbying. The rest will take care of itself.
Merging the two houses won't help. We need proportional representation. Make the senate 600 seats, and a national, proportional election (seats are given based on % of votes for the party). They're still 6 year terms, with elections every two years. Seats are given to any party that can clear 0.5% to start, then the threshold is increased to 2% after 12 years. Then expand the house. Now you have local reps and proportional reps. Much better than giving "states" reps, which makes almost no sense.
Most of this could be done with removing lobbying and just call it what it is: bribes. I bet you, once that (which would be extremely hard to pass congress) passes america would be a lot better
Ranked choice (also known as instant runoff or IRV) is barely better than first past the post (which is plurality voting). A better choice is 3-2-1 or STAR voting, both of which outperform IRV by a huge margin. But even if those are too complicated for people, Approval voting is still better than IRV.
Missing a lot things. Gerrymandering can still occur without the electoral college, tax things seems neat in theory but need to deal with corporate taxes, term limits on the supreme court would make things worse (research indicates an age out system would be better), Police system will still be fundamentally broken, companies will still continue to maximize profit to everyone but the shareholder deficit, stock buybacks are creating major issues and allow companies to game Wallstreet, are just a few things that I think are missing here that need to be addressed.
Proposing IRV is nice and all, and definitely an improvement (whatever you do don't listen to nutters proposing range voting…it's trivially gameable…and personally I just don't think Approval's lack of ability to give a nuanced vote is very good).
But the real change happens when you move away from single-winner seat entirely. Use something like MMP or STV where the votes can be distributed proportionally.
Australia is a really good example, because we have a bit of both. Look at our House of Representatives. It uses IRV like you propose America switch to. Labor got 33% of the vote and 51% of seats. LNP got 35% of votes and 38% of votes. Greens got 12% of the vote and less than 3% of seats. Yikes. One Nation got almost 5% of votes and 0 seats.
Then look at our Senate. It uses STV so that in a normal election, each state elects 6 Senators and territories elect 1. Labor got 30% of votes and 20% of seats. LNP got 33% and 20%. Greens got 13% and 6%. One Nation, United Australia Party, independent David Pocock, and the Lambie Network each got 1 seat (1.3% of seats) on 4.3%, 3.5%, 0.4%, and 0.2% of votes, respectively. These numbers are obviously not perfect, but they're a hell of a lot better than the Reps' results. STV is a sort of quasi-proportional system, retaining local representation. In our case "local" means "at the state level", but you could also do it by taking 5–12 House of Reps districts and merging them into 1 district, returning 5–12 Representatives.
True proportional systems like MMP (look at NZ and Germany for examples of that in action) or direct proportional systems without a local member (like the Netherlands) get even closer to perfectly matching voters' will.
Oohh this is fun!
Another one: jail employees of companies if they signed off on criminal activities. If I commit 1000 dollar fraud o go to jail, obviously. If a company commits a billion dollar fraud, they get a fraction of revenue fine, really? Jail the fuckers who made those decisions. If you signed off on that decision, then too fucking bad, you go to jail. If a company forces you to commit a crime then quit and report the crime.
Your list implies the US does VAT. It's one of the only places that doesn't.
As a US senator, that list looks like COMMUNISM to me.
Instead of all that, just one thing. Start there and everything else will unfold from it: remove private corporate money from politics. All contributions to a politician or political party to be public and capped, per citizen.
As a mathematician, I want to see this modified slightly (I will pair the original with my modification)
Income up to $50k is untaxed
Income up to $100k is untaxed (I have done the math, this would actually work with one of my other modifications)
VAT tax for luxury items
VAT for B2B sales based on the Value Added by their step in the production chain
Remove sales tax
Remove tax brackets - replace with a continuous function that has parameters to encapsulate the current credits and deductions, as well as new ones to encourage reasonable behaviors (green energy, having kids, not having kids, etc.)
Addendum to the above: business taxes fall get the same treatment, with parameters for things like the wealth/income gap ratio between the highest-paid employee and the median for the company, % of employees who reside in the United States, number of subsidiaries, number of technology acquisitions made. Oh, and companies that make more than $1M/yr never get a refund, period.
Require communities to cap rent, it is done by popular vote as a ballot measure, and the options are calculated based on local needs, cost of living, and median income for the town.
I have more, but I also have a headache.
Add winner takes all elections to this list. It always leads to a shitty two party system, exhibit a being the USA. Instead, have elections with 30 parties, each having a little bit of power, that have to work together. It gives people a chance to actually vote for the person they want, it stops the extreme swinging to left and right each time an election is won by the other side.
Add 100% income tax for those with a net worth over a certain amount, say 1 billion or so. If at some point you have souch money that you can impossibly spend it in your life time, you don't need to have it. Need investors? Make non profit investment funds, financed by the government taxes.
Add 100% gains tax for companies that have grown beyond a certain amount of employees. No extremely large company with 80.000 workers is a nice place to work at, they guaranteed fuck over the employees and customers because that's what they do. Simply cap companies on how big they can be.
Extending the previous one: prohibit companies from buying other companies. It always ends up stifling the competition, it pushes companies that wholly exist for being bought, nothing else, it's not healthy.
Also tax the rich.
Forced retirement of politicians at whatever the national retirement age currently is
I haven't really seen it mentioned here yet but policy makers and judge rulings should either have additional schooling in the area they are making the policy/ruling on OR have a mandatory specialist/professional input throughout the process. So many of these brain dead policies come from not even know what TF they are talking about.
I want proper understanding from these people before they agree or pass something because "it sounds good" from lobbying
You forgot abolishing slavery.
There should be something in there about universal free education
All excellent ideas.
Now how do we afford to bribe all of the politicians to make this happen?
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