Missing:
Disallow corporate campaign donations
Politicians prohibited from owning stocks
Not just owning stocks but prohibited from all markets. The options market is not the stock market, neither are futures or currency markets, bond markets, etc. They have the power to manipulate all of these and should be barred from all forms accordingly.
Gotta include their spouses/immediate families, honestly should probably have audits on close family/friends who may be a proxy for their investments.
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What would it take to actually get ranked choice voting? That would need a constitutional amendment right?
If you could achieve 1 thing on this list you could do all of them.
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.
We need proportional representation.
That’s what the House is for.
But not in the same way that actual proportional representation works. They’re distributed by population yes, but they’re tied to a geographical location. Real proportional representation is national. So you have one legislative body tied to a district they’re supposed to represent, and another tied to the base of voters across the country that elected them.
The house is Local Representation. You don’t vote for what party you want to see control the house, you vote for a local representative to represent you and your neighbors.
It is also that. The two are by necessity the same thing.
No?
Proportional representation is where parties get a number of seats proportional to the percent of votes they get.
Proportional voting methods are often nation-wide, although there’s also e.g. mixed member proportional and local 3-5 member districts elected via STV like they do in Ireland.
By making them the same thing, you encourage gerrymandering. In the US, there’s no way for a third party to gain any representation. A national, proportional election would force the issue and allow for more diversity in political thought.
twenty year old me “heck yeah”
Forty year old me “never going to happen.”
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
No tax reform? It’s a great start to make taxes easier for most individuals but we shouldn’t be allowing wealthier people to pay less percentage of taxes. There’s a bewildering array of complexity that doesn’t matter to most individuals but only serves to lower the tax rate if people who can afford to take advantage of it
That and I think the “no taxes for 50k and under” would be devastating to the budget, if the median income for a family is around 60k then that’s a fuckton of tax income that is lost.
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).
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Not sure what is called, but ban and back tax/punish people/companies who use those foreign PO boxes and claim that that company owns the IP everything that they use, so they actually made no profit, all to avoid paying taxes. And then because “made no money” they get cash from the governments.
Whats a luxury item for purposes of VAT? You’ll be hung up forever on that.
For example cars:
- some consider all cars a luxury we need to step away from
- some see the reality that cars are required for most of us
- where do you draw the line between a “necessary” car and a “luxury” car?
- for the love of god, no special treatment for light trucks
VAT is just a shitty tax mechanisim, ends up being regressive (people with less money pay a larger portion of income), and really shouldnt be used. Land value tax + carbon tax is much better, and has nice side benefits like encouraging housing development and walkability.
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.
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.
