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.
Heir heir
Hair hair
Har har
Add in an office for a publicly owned rail system.
It’s pretty simple, just have a new real estate investment tax that is only levelled on residential properties you own but do not reside in, and that tax needs to be set at a rate higher than the property market is expected to gain. E.g. (with made-up numbers) if the property market gains 5% value per year on average, set the tax rate at 10% of the value per year. There’s an insanely slim chance you can still make money on the investment, but 99+% of investors would dump their properties immediately, leading to a massive crash where average people could suddenly afford to buy the home they’ve been renting.
Ooh ooh I love these.
Wouldn’t this have the effect of increasing rent by 10% of the cost of the property each year?
A policy this significant would cause a market crash so massive that it would entirely reshape the market. I don’t think any of us could genuinely guess how it will work out.
My hope is that it would cause a crash so significant that essentially all owned properties that are not lived in enter the market, causing homes to be sold for insanely low prices in order to avoid paying taxes, causing rates of home ownership to skyrocket. The government then needs to buy up anything leftover to rent as social and affordable housing to low-income people who can’t afford a mortgage at that time. Crashing house prices also mean that the value of these taxes drops in absolute terms as well.
Then we have a situation where everyone who has a stable income owns a home, and those who can’t will rent directly from the government at extremely affordable rates. Homes are the object we as humans own that we regularly lease to one another the most - particularly for profit or capital gain. It’s super weird and it needs to stop.
The main issue is that economists would shit their pants because so much GDP growth is locked up in our property markets. It would cause at least a recession, if not a depression, and depending on which country did it, the effects could ricochet throughout the global economy such as during the GFC.
Well, you’re right about the epic market crash, also right that it’s unpredictable, but then you go on to predict a bunch of things which seem extremely unlikely to me.
The thing is, a “crash” is not just a lowering of prices until everyone can afford the repayments on a house.
The kind of crash you’re taking about here is more like a market failure. Yes all banks would become insolvent but that’s kind of like saying the toilets on the titanic became “out of order” when it sank.
You’d basically revert to subsistence farming. Everyone living in a community of more than a few hundred would die of starvation or disease. Mexico, China, or Russia would roll in to permanently “provide aid”.
What you say also seems extremely unlikely to me, given that humans who have sufficiently advanced to the state we live in now will be unwilling to accept subsistence lifestyle.
I didn’t predict anything; you’ll note I said that this is what I would hope happens.
I’m not talking about a market failure; I’m talking about trying to take away the whole concept of a ‘market’ applying to residential real estate altogether. Because it’s so intertwined with the value of our economies, taking it away will cause a significant, permanent shrinking of GDP and other economic measures, and I think that’s appropriate given the circumstances we’re in now.
It’s a big and bold move, and as I’ve said before none of us can be exactly sure how it would pan out, but nothing is gained in life if nothing is ventured. We need to try something. I say this as someone who is lucky enough to be able to have a mortgage: it’s inherently unfair that my fellow citizens have to miss out on that opportunity.
Sorry, I meant that subsistence agriculture would be the only possible lifestyle, not a chosen one.
Each of us are talking about a crash or collapse of completely different magnitude.
At the risk of sounding too preppy, I think societal collapse is absolutely possible due to what we might think is a fairly minor supply chain interruption.
Regardless, it’s a moot point. No one is going to crash the economy so you can buy a house I’m sorry.
No one is going to crash the economy so you can buy a house I’m sorry.
I think you might have missed where I said this:
I say this as someone who is lucky enough to be able to have a mortgage: it’s inherently unfair that my fellow citizens have to miss out on that opportunity.
The problem with that is there is a very clear policy purpose and interest in making housing an investment - the vast vast majority of people will eventually own a home, and it is a forced savings vehicle because people are REALLY bad at saving for retirement. Even if you fix our lack of a social safety net, home ownership is generally seen as a public good because it encourages people investing more in and caring about their community, being willing to pay higher taxes to support more services, etc. It’s not a no brainer to make housing an investment (there are arguments against in a society with a good social safety net), but it is very purposeful through good public policy. It has little to do with the recent (very recent, relatively) buying up of single family homes by investment banks, etc, despite people implying all the time it’s some secret cabal and shadowy wealthy figures doing it for their own benefit. Everyone sees conspiracies everywhere these days.
Of course, if we’re going to say that home ownership is “good” and keep doing all the tax incentives for it, we do need to stop corporations speculating and driving up housing costs, and could do so by some targeted taxes on unoccupied properties in the same portfolio. But there’s an argument to be made that that’s a relatively small portion of the problem, since a lot of our housing stock issues can be traced back to single family zoning issues, as well as road and highway funding leading to suburban sprawl and unaffordable newly developed subdivisions while cheaper starter homes don’t exist anymore…but either way affordable housing stock just hasn’t kept up.
Agree a thousand percent. Some ideas:
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No corporate home ownership
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If multiple properties are owned they must be run as a non-profit
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Move to a land-value tax so that holding undeveloped land as an investment is not viable.
I live in a rural area. Surrounding my humble 2 bedroom home are a few acres of rocks and cliffs that are vacant land with a well I have to run a small pump to get water from. The county already taxes me on this vacant unbuildable land as separate property.
I live a very simple life and make just under median income so not rolling in money by any means. If i were to get taxed on this undeveloped land as an investment it would make it unaffordable for me and I’d have to sell for less than I could afford a new home. How is this preventing land hoarding?
Yeah that is a good question. It is meant to tax strictly the value of the land. So undeveloped rural land will be taxed very low, vs say undeveloped urban land. The idea is to incentivize productive land use of more valuable land so that as the value of the land goes up, it becomes untenable not to put it to use. In your case, it the land is unbuildable then then the tax would be quite low, even if things to get built up around you. This is just the tip of the iceberg of an economic theory called Georgism, that I am still wrapping my head around.
it’s been a while since I’ve heard about it, but iirc LVT generally evaluates and decides on taxes based on proximity to other developments, so undeveloped land or poor density land that is close to more developed housing, is taxed more heavily, while land out in the boonies isn’t taxed very heavily. it’s supposed to incentivize development in more desirable places to live, and naturally eliminate situations in which higher value plots end up getting bought up by rich people for their whims.
at the same time, it’s still a solution that’s ultimately relying on the free market to maximize their profit margins, and that being good for society, it’s just decreasing the relative profit margins for each plot of land through higher taxes. it still retains harmful forms of development, it just, potentially, eliminates them more naturally, compared to explicit bans.
It would still work with a heavily regulated market. And in my opinion would need to be paired with zoning regulations and environmental policy. For example a stretch of wilderness that happens to be on top of a vein of coal would have the same value and tax as the same land without the coal if regulations prevent coal mining, adjusting incentives away from the most harmful uses.
Edit: grammar
It would still work in a heavily regulated market, yeah, but the thing with georgism is that it tends to be advertised as a kind of one-size-fits-all solution to the housing market, as a highly sought after “single tax” or “perfect tax”. If you look at the historical ties of georgism which I also kind of struggle to remember, I think I remember that being kind of, the thing about it, was that it was aligned with like, the dominant labor parties, but was kind of seen as too moderate and singularly committed of a position.
So, the tax itself is cool, and agreeable, but the georgists as a kind of, party, and georgism as a philosophy built around a singular tax, I’m still not sure about. I’m skeptical of silver-bullet solutions, which is what georgism is often made out to be. It also gives me bad vibes because anytime I hear someone talking so highly about some obscure 19th or 20th century political philosophy, it gives me the same alarm bells as people who want to be rhodesian infantrymen, or people who want to be dengists, or shit like that. I dunno. Henry george was an interesting and prescient dude but he was also in many ways a product of his time, I think. Here’s marx talking about him in a letter I haven’t read, might interest you I guess.
Good point about people speaking ‘highly about some obscure 19th or 20th century political philosophy’ ringing certain alarm bells. I certainly share your skepticism. I wouldn’t call myself a ‘Goergist’. I do think LVT is worth looking into when trying to solve land-hoarding and wealthy entities treating property as an investment portfolio at the expense of families in need of homes.
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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.
What happens if you have a streak of single term presidents, with no new judges appointed?
I would rather see a lottery system implemented. Every year, the oldest standing percentage of judges gets retired and replaced with randomly picked judges out of a pool that meets certain requirements (these can be debated). No election, no appointment, using an auditable system, and participation is compulsory, with strict restrictions of what activities the judge is allowed to participate in while serving so that they’re discouraged from staying on term too long.
Jury duty for judges. Interesting thought!
What if we turned it into a virtual supreme court like that?
Every case gets heard 2-3 times, Judges are randomly assigned from the pool of federal judges that meet qualifications.
This body could vote to impeach their members, and courts are randomly assembled for a few months at a time
The idea being, the supreme Court has one job - to decide matters of law, meaning they decide edge cases and conflicts. They need to understand the law, not have power - the goal is consistency in applying the law. A method to find consensus among top judges seems a lot more stable and effective than individuals
second-term presidents having expanded power seems scary. otherwise this all seems cool. any ideas about reforming lower federal judge appointments by the president?
The problem with the Senate is that it gives land more power than people. The weight given to a Senate voter in a less populated state like Montana is like 40x that of a voter in a state like California. Abolishing the Senate would move the power of each voter closer to equality. Anti-gerrymandering measures would get you the rest of the way there.
You understand, I appreciate you. Realize you are thinking for yourself and you represent an individual who would make the world a better place if you speak loud.
You can still expand the seats and ensure that reps have roughly an equal number of constituents for a state wide race.
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.
This needs to be more.
Fix the education system to promote children. Feed and nurture them. Give them healthy foods to fuel their minds. Feed them 3x a day if needed. Stop allowing the people to decide if this should be covered by taxes.
Eliminate grade blocks (tiers, years, whatever) so kids that excel and not be hampered by kids that don’t want to be there. I was so bored until grade 5, then someone recognized my abilities and fostered them. I was the class clown and acted out because i was bored until I was shifted into a different class which was advanced in every way. If I show top grades, maybe I shouldn’t be held back because little Tommy the bully is a dipshit (he deserves to learn at his own pace).
In later years, remove redundant classes and replace with trades for students that are not excelling. Teach them viable skills. No one needs to have history classes in high schools, unless it serves a purpose. The only option for someone with zero skills should not be military school.
And for the love that is all wholly educational, pay our teachers so much better. Promote teachers that show drive (regardless of student year). Also mandate continuing education for them.
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
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.
The problem with that is that will cause areas to drive up housing prices to expand the untaxed group to general more “upper middle class” to price out undesirables and draw in higher earners as a form of tax break. This already happens without the tax bracket scaling and would probably get 10x worse.
I don’t have a great alternative, but maybe a weighted CoL combined with 0% below median income in the district? Something like that, but that would probably cause low CoL areas to pay way more taxes. Maybe I am thinking of it wrong.
Or to GDP, so lower income people will benefit from increase in productivity via lower taxes?
There are no financial reforms on this wish list, which are necessary to make these other reforms stick:
- Abolish PACs
- Implement campaign finance limits
- Implement campaign public funding
- Curtail/abolish lobbying
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.
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
I think we already know what people have higher needs and have been historically marginalized and exploited. Instead of relying on private funding, we can have the state employ people to work on the project of “leveling the playing field”. that committee or bureau would be transparent to the public and have elected positions within it but not be ultimately ruled by those elected officials. we could have people with verifiable community backgrounds employed on a regular and/or contract basis. this could allow work with regional groups and even more granular than that. basically i imagine providing them grants and resources to get the pulse of the communities they serve and channel that info back through. the people that know how best to serve local communities are the advocates within them.
And shadow pools, and SEC very-obvious-not-even-hiding-it corruption, and financial institutions with way to high random frees, limit banks profiting short-term so much from eg monetary policy changes, etc.
You’ll need a constitutional amendment or a radical change up in the Supreme Court to abolish PACs. That’s considered a free speech issue. I am not sure I have high hopes of a constitutional amendment being passed in our lifetimes.
- Ban variable width fonts
angry John Hancock noises
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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.
Simply removing/raising the cap on House of Representatives would give us most of the benefit - representation could be closer to actual population and electoral college presumably matches.
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).
You’re never going to eliminate gerrymandering without switching to proportional representation. I prefer to use Sequential Proportional Approval Voting, which is just Approval Voting with extra steps.
My two suggestions for OP are:
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Simplify and focus the list. It’s too long and touches too many different topics. Also, when you do have a full list with every topic, separate them by category.
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As stated above, use Approval Voting and Proportional Representation.
This is very interesting, but I’m struggling to see how it would work within our current system of single-district representatives. Would Congressional Districts be abolished, and each state pick their allocated Congressmen through Approval Voting? I also don’t see what benefits Approval Voting has over Rank Choice Voting other than simplicity.
There’s plenty of ways to do it. The simplest would be to quintuple the size of the house and elect five winners to every district. Literally nothing else would have to change. Five member districts are considered the smallest that are functionally immune to gerrymandering efforts.
A more reasonable suggestion is to start implementing these reforms on the state and local level, where referendums are possible and you have an easier time building a big enough organization to actually get shit done.
As for Approval vs RCV, the simplest answer is that they usually agree on the results [all the way down the line]https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/super-tuesday-deep-voting-methods-dive/), but approval is simpler and easier in every respect. Both systems tend to produce a candidate support graph that looks like exponential decay in real life. The complicated answer gets into voting theory/math and all sorts of technical criterion. While I think those arguments are valid, most poling and real world data seem to show that basically anything other than “choose one” is good enough, so I prefer the method that is easiest to explain to voters and hardest for candidates to claim shenanigans.
Interesting, I’ve never heard about this system before, it definitely sounds interesting. I think this will be my next rabbit hole, thanks for sharing!
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this is the easiest one to fix. Stop letting the current party draw voting districts.
Have a government bureaucratic department do it, like in civilized countries. Have rules for it, and have it be accountable to the DOJ (or similar).
I would go with computer generated district lines based on population, with some sort of non-partisan or bipartisan zoning committee to review and approve them, but there are tons of workable solutions. The problem is both parties benefit from gerrymandering, so there’s no political will to fix it. The solution is simple, but not easy.
Doesn’t removing electoral college remove the need for zones?
Or is that a problem on local county levels as well?
The electoral college is a mostly separate problem. The biggest problem caused by gerrymandering is partisan divides in the House of Representatives. Congressional Districts are drawn to keep districts as red or blue as possible, so Congress gets made up by extremists. If districts were drawn fairly, politicians would need to appeal to a broader community, and their positions would be more nuanced. Gerrymandering essentially lets the politicians pick their voters instead of voters picking their politicians.
Ohh, right, yes, parties and polarisation that only benefits politicians. I always need some time to fully remember what I know about the USA political system.
I would have agreed on the Senate 20 years ago. But it has so clearly become the stick with which about 15 percent of the country beats the entire rest of the country.
At some point you have to call it as an abusive body.
Yes, but I think that’s more of a problem with our politics rather than the senate. The Republicans have gone to political extremes that just aren’t popular with the majority of the country, so they struggle to pass legislation that their base would approve of through the House. Instead, they adopted a culture of obstruction in the Senate, because blocking legislation is all they can do. There are ways that their ability can obstruct can be limited, like abolishing the filibuster, but changing the culture of extremism is the only long-term solution.
Ending gerrymandering is probably the biggest institutional fix towards that goal. Right now, Congressional Districts are basically giant echo chambers that amplify the most extreme voices. Breaking down those chambers and forcing politicians to appeal to a plurality of random voters should bring rhetoric down to sane levels, and that should apply to both the House and the Senate.
I know how it got that way but it’s not going to change even with the filibuster removed. It needs to go. It was a great idea when we were more decentralized and we knew less about democracy. But we can replace it with a national proportionally representative body and leave the House as the geographical representative.
Hmm…that’s definitely an interesting idea, but it still gives the highly populated states unchecked power over the smaller states. Either way, if the house remains the same, then gerrymandering will still need to end.
The idea of larger and smaller states is effectively dead. We’re a centralized country and the only thing going on right now is the states that have made life too shitty for people to stay are holding the rest of the country hostage.
It was a great idea in 1792. But not in 1992.
I don’t think that’s true at all. I’m not one of those, “states rights,” guys that believes that every state should decide who gets basic human rights, but I do think there are tons of ways larger states could use their outsized power against smaller states. The one that comes to mind is nuclear waste storage, which was a huge fight in the 80s that required a lot of negotiation. Imagine if New York, Texas, California, Pennsylvania, and Florida just got together with and decided Montana just had to manage it all.
Also, considering the western states have a much higher percentage of federal land than eastern states, their communities are much more likely to get screwed by the federal government. If I lived in Utah, where the vast majority of the land in my state is under federal control, I would certainly want more than 3 out of 435 Representatives in the federal government.
You’re forgetting that under this proposal we balance the House of Representatives with a national proportional representation legislature. And we can certainly uncap the house of representatives. So the “small” states can easily form a caucus in either chamber.
That said. Nuclear storage is actually a great issue to bring up. We’re going to need to store it somewhere and that place needs very specific things. Using the Senate as a NIMBY method so hard it doesn’t get stored anywhere is the perfect example of the dysfunction inherent in the Senate.
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.
the way this works in australia is that election day is always a sunday (i think? or saturday?) but you can early vote at any number of larger polling stations without giving a reason… also postal vote
but given your name, maybe you know that? :p
Or, you know, just have mail in voting available nationwide.
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.
It also forces the government to make voting easy.
No it doesn’t. I could easily see Republicans making voting very difficult under such a system, particularly within zip codes that vote for Democrats. This would punish Dem supporters who failed to vote, and would generally make the public hostile to mandatory voting - which would help build public support for the abolition of such mandatory voting
The government is only incentivized to make voting easy if all major parties are loyal to the public. That isn’t the case in the United States
This website is disgustingly authoritarian. Force people to vote? Fucking christ.
I don’t think mandatory voting is a good solution. This is mostly practices in autocratic/dictatorial states, and would have a bad taste to it.
What should be done is to either make voting day a public holiday (with mandatory “half day off” rule for anyone who would still have to work in retail or services), or just move it to a Sunday, like many other countries have done ages ago.
Australia is a dictatorship?
It is the surprising exception to the rule. I never questioned this, but are there any real reasons for mandatory voting in Australia?
We have a small population and mandatory voting means everyone gets a vote by default. We also have a different culture around voting because the majority of us have to do it. We have sausage sizzles and democracy dogs. I’ve personally worked at polls all over my state and there’s never been a line longer than 10 people. It takes most people like 5 mins max to vote. We make voting easy in Australia because everyone has to do it.
It’s worth noting that it’s not all that mandatory. It’s relatively easy to simply avoid enrolling to vote. You’re not automatically enrolled in other words. Also it’s really easy to just sign your name off at the poll and hand in a blank vote. The worst outcome of not voting is a fine that you can pretty easily get out of as well.
there’s never been a line longer than 10 people. It takes most people like 5 mins max to vote. We make voting easy
In the US, this is also part of our divisiveness. I’ve always found biting to be quick, easy, convenient. Never much of a line and it moves fast. Registration to vote is by default at RMV or can be done directly. Mail in or absentee voting is trivially available.
Stories of people waiting in line for hours is just as alien to me as it is to you. You cant escape the obvious correlations where it is more difficult to vote depending on which political party is dominant, the wealth of the voting area, and racial makeup. It also strongly corresponds with gerrymandering.
Is Belgium also a surprising exception?
No, obviously you have a dictator king with prima nocta in the constitution as an obligation - he now has to sleep with every single newly wed (separately) on their (same) wedding night or be executed.
But it’s tradition, it would be wrong to change it now. If I was fucked by the king, so needs to be everyone else or it wouldn’t be fair.
(This post was made with the help of /s)
I think this is the wrong question. Why is voting optional? We can crow about nebulous “freedom”, but we are forced to do much harder things all the time. Once every few years, we’re asked to make a few decisions.
If the idea is that the citizens select leaders, but it’s incredibly easy to opt out, what you have is a biased selection committee. We can argue all day about the various biases involved and if they matter, but the reality is that it’s not burdensome on Australians and it actually makes sense to get your source election data as close to based on public sentiment as you can.
Supreme Court should be subject to ethics laws and rules, not exempt from them
Rules adjudicated by whom? You’d need another independent judiciary specifically tasked with overseeing the SCOTUS, and there’s a lot of reasons why that would be a dicey proposition.
Even if they’re responsible for policing themselves, you’d get a huge improvement by making them write it down. We shouldn’t have Clarence Thomas claiming he didn’t know that accepting $100k+ is an obvious conflict of interest.
My company has no problem writing down ethics policies for me - I’m sure they’d let the supremes copy it. We even have regular training to clarify edge cases that Clarence Thomas claimed to not understand. I’m sure they could subscribe to the same service
Even if they’re responsible for policing themselves, you’d get a huge improvement by making them write it down.
Would you? Do you seriously think guys like Kavanaugh and Alito would sincerely self-report? Or would they just lie with impunity and dare you to call their bluffs?
We shouldn’t have Clarence Thomas claiming he didn’t know that accepting $100k+ is an obvious conflict of interest.
Who holds Thomas to account when he’s caught perjuring himself? What court do you put him in front of?
My company has no problem writing down ethics policies for me
Without a doubt, because you’re staff and they’re the boss. But there’s no one to hold the owner of a company to its own internal policies. Not when the owner gets to author, adjudicate, and dictate the administration of those policies. No Twitter HR rep is going to rein in Elon Musk.
Currently, they not only judge themselves but decide what their standards are.
Clarence Thomas was found out, and we’re all outraged. So far, he’s claiming various versions of ignorance and there’s no rule against it. Writing down ethical standards mean he can no longer make those claims. He’d have no excuse, no way to delay.
You’re right that he still might not be held accountable, but it is a step in the right direction
Writing down ethical standards mean he can no longer make those claims.
Okay, sure. But then he just makes a new set of bullshit claims, and nobody exists in a position to call him on it.
You’re right that he still might not be held accountable, but it is a step in the right direction
If it was a step we were taking, I won’t object. Part of the problem with this bullshit is that reforms are almost always DOA, outside of hypothetical debates. But if I’m starting from a blank slate and told “Fix the SCOTUS”, I’d dream a bit bigger than a rule with no teeth.
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:
- Make voting day a national holiday.
- Make absentee voting without an excuse a national standard.
- Enable repeat voting where only your last vote “counts”, allowing absentee voters to change their minds.
- Ban states from announcing vote totals until all votes are in, preventing people from voting with more knowledge than others.
- Make allowing people who have served their time in prison to vote a national standard.
- Overturn the recent SCOTUS ruling about the 14A actually applying to Federal office.
I have a few to add.
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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.
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(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.
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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.
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Abortion is added as a constitutionally protected right.
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An exact definition to the limits on the executive power, privileges and protections of the President.
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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.
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Single purpose bills without any tagalong laws attached to them only.
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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.
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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.
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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?
the non-partisan committee gets final say.
good luck with non-partisan
States do not vote for president, people do
mu funding fathers! /s
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
That’s communism /s (or socialism? I don’t know, I agree with you, I’m just thinking what the other side would parrot out). Also, mu (lack of) competition! Think of the poor shareholders! (also /s of course)
An exact definition to the limits on the executive power, privileges and protections of the President.
with an added clause that says “if you look for a loophole, it means you’re automatically wrong. Don’t be a dick”
gerrymandering is rendered obsolete by points 1 and 2 on the list…so that’s already included in the OP ;)the reason gerrymandering is a thing, is because of the first-past-the-post/winner-takes-all voting system, which ranked choice replaces.ranked choice allows propotional representation, which also fixes the 2 party problem!edit, also fixes your point 2, because under ranked choice there is only a popular vote (also just known as “a vote”, because there isn’t any other one left)nvm, got something mixed up…shouldn’t comment when half asleep…
I think you misunderstand what ranked choice is. You may be thinking of proportional voting, where seats are divied based on the relative percentage of support a party has. That would eliminate Gerrymandering. Ranked choice is just a method of runoff voting for a single seat. It’s still very much subject to Gerrymandering.
oh, damn, you’re right!
i got that mixed up; i thought ranked choice also includes proportional representation, because it frees up your secondary vote to be for whoever you want it to be, without pressure to vote for a canditate that “has a chance of winning”, thus alleviating the issue of strategic voting…but that’s pretty much the only thing it does.
but the proportional representation is tied to the way mandates/seats are distributed, which isn’t tied to the how the vote works.
so if the senate still had the same number of seats per state, it wouldn’t fix representation, because the weight of the votes still wouldn’t be equal…
yeah, sorry for the confusion…long day…but thanks for the polite correction!
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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.
