1y ago

Does this plan make sense? v2

374 comments

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.
- 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?
- Agree a thousand percent. Some ideas:
  No corporate home ownership
  If multiple properties are owned they must be run as a non-profit
  Move to a land-value tax so that holding undeveloped land as an investment is not viable.
- 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.

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.
  
  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
- 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
- Why stop there? Why keep the stock market at all? It's only real purpose is for the rich to play games with their wealth, to distribute wealth towards themselves, etc. People shouldn't be making a living off of speculative investment at all. Jobs should contribute to society. Owning is not a job.
  
  I'm pretty sure if you got rid of "the stock market" it would immediately be reinvented.
  "Hey, I need money to start my CatChat app. If you invest, I'll give you part of the company"
  "Cool."
  "Hmm.. I bet I could sell parts of this to the public the same way"
  Maybe the worst parts wouldn't be reinvented right away, but those are the things that need to actually go. High frequency trading, weird nonsense that's not actually creating value, etc
  
  That's an interesting idea. I've found personally that every time I've worked for a publically traded company I've hated it because everything is just about increasing share price no matter what. OTOH I think investment is very useful for progress though... I'm not sure how investment would work without ownership
- The worst part is unrealised gains from selling shares you don't own? Until a company is bankrupt? But then keep that company alive as a zombie so you never have to pay any tax or explain how you sold more shares than existed? See Sears and toys r Us.
- I like this. If you use something as collateral, then it means the lender has assigned some amount of value to that thing and now you have a number that you can apply taxes to.

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.
- 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.
- 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.

Ban variable width fonts
- angry John Hancock noises

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:
  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.
  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.
- 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.
- 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.

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?

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

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.

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.
- Yeah, would probably like to see ranked choice swapped out for something else too. My preferred tool is STAR, but there's a lot of other options. The biggest benefit of RC is it isn't as bad as what we have, which is good, but it isn't great.
  
  There are multiple kinds of ranked choice voting. The "popular" one in America right now is IRV, but you shouldn't assume all ranked choice voting algorithms are IRV and hence share its flaws (and benefits). My personal favorite RC algorithm is Ranked Pairs. I am not familiar with STAR.

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?
- 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.

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.
- This is only workable if you also eliminate gerrymandering. Otherwise The party that's in charge initially will turn it into an enduring uni party across the whole country.

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.
- Lock the number of justices at 9. Have an 18 year term limit with a rolling new appointee every 2 years on a non-election year. If a Justice is removed or leaves before their term is over the interim Justice only serves out the rest of that position's term. Appointees cannot serve more than a 24 year term to give interm Justices a chance to continue serving if they were appointed during the last years of another Justice.
  There's for sure still flaws under that system but it's not exactly upending the position like a 10 year limit does. Also it should keep the court within the prevailing opinion of the country without it being overly politicized since appointments happen in non-election years.

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.
- If you made it to 25 or 30 (age requirements for congress), 40 was not a surprise. A person then was considered old at 65-70, so younger than now, but not much

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.
- substitute inflation with CPI: that’s what we do in australia… inflation is a finance term that kinda doesn’t represent cost of living: you’re seeing that in the US right now i believe where your inflation is actually not terrible, but your cost of living is crazy
  CPI does introduce some BS though because it’s not exactly a specific set of rules… we had an issue recently where the govt set CPI lower than what people thought it should be and everyone was pretty outraged
- You can cover a lot of gender and abortion issues, with a right to elective medical care.

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.
- "Protecting" the less populous states from what?
  
  People in flyover states do have legitimate concerns that are not priorities in California, Texas, and New York. Massively increasing the size of the House solves the problem with the tiny states where there are fewer people per representative in the small states, while preserving some power for them in the Senate.
  If you only did representative by population, Wyoming and Vermont would essentially be cut out of the national political process entirely. The tyranny of the majority can be a dangerous thing.
  
  From the tyranny of the majority. Each state is equally represented in the Senate, versus the House where states are apportioned seats by population.

i think one small addition
decrease influence of ~~bribing~~ lobbying
- abolishing corporate personhood would effectively do this, since that's the primary justification for legalizing corruption in the USA.
  
  I guess, so the law at present seems mostly made up. Like, it can't deal with glaring issues without a precedent and what amounts to a long-winded ritual before significant issues are considered.
  I guess I don't see why a corp can't be accountable like how some people who commit petty crimes are 'held accountable' (i.e. shot, killed, worked in labour camps).
- Why not just add 1. Everyone gets free money and is happy all the time
  
  Yeah I guess if I could add free time and money and make it so everyone is happy I would add it.

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.
- Agreed, although ranked choice with some form or proportional allocation instead of "single winner take all" might be even better.
  
  That would mean electing parties and the parties choosing the specific candidates. That works until party interests are so entrenched that you cannot get any new representation without standing up an entire new party.

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.
https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/
- I'm a big advocate for approval voting.
  
  I have been also, but I'm open to STAR and 321. The main reason I like AV is because it would short circuit two party dynamics completely.
- Or even the D'Hondt method

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
- We still need lobbying for its original purpose of getting information from experts on topics that government official don't know much about. How do we reconcile that?
  
  What you described is an "expert advisory" not a "lobby".
  Lobby (n): a group of people seeking to influence politicians or public officials on a particular issue.
  Expert (n): An expert is a person who is very skilled at doing something or who knows a lot about a particular subject.
  Advisor (n): An adviser is an expert whose job is to give advice to another person or to a group of people.
  A lobby has no prerequisite of knowing a damn thing about the topic they are trying to influence on, hence why we have lobbies related to women's health that think women can hold their period.
  Abolish lobbies and place stringent criteria on advisory groups requiring that they reasonably demonstrate competence in their advisory field, are only allowed to advise on specific narrow topics, have to be recertified every N years, all advisory actions on subjects not related to national security are public record to be made available and on an indexable public access database (including what the subject was, what the advice was given, who requested the advice, who gave it, and a list of all officials/staffers who received it), and are not allowed to engage in financial transactions with sitting or recently retired Congressional officials or staffers. In this case, I would say "recently" would be on the order of 10 years.

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.
  
  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.
  
  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.

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.
- the only danger of that is it requires a populace to be aware of ALL crimes, which usually isnt realistic.
  oops you didn't put a litium ion battery warning on a box and it shipped on a plane? go to jail.
  
  Not any more than it does now. Ignorantia juris non excusat. Ignorance of the law excuses not. It is a primary doctrine in US law as it stands, I don't see why this case should be any different.
  My personal flavor of this idea could down to this: if your company is found guilty of a criminal offense that would result in jail time for an individual, all board members and C-level executives are held accountable and face the same punishment as an individual would for the same crime. The only exceptions are:
  There was an intentional malicious effort made on the part of a subordinate to use the law to attack their employer.
  It can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the illegal activity was perpetrated on by a subordinate in a manner that would have expressly and reasonably obfuscated the activity from the notice of a rational, attentive observer.
  The illegal activity brought lethal harm upon the company (meaning that the activity directly lead to the complete and total failure and dissolution of the organization and all subsidiaries and shell companies were dissolved as a result)
  Outside of those 3, they asses go to jail, assets get seized, and yahts go up in police auctions.
  
  I mean bigger things, like Philips knowingly selling CPAP machines they knew were defective and would cause cancer and god knows what else. They knew, didn't recall, continued selling anyway, people died. Nobody is in jail, though.
  Fuck that, jail the fuckers.
  A similar case can be made for Boeing and many others.
  Start jailing execs and companies will start paying attention
  
  It works really well for Venezuela.

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.
- I broadly agree; if you're in the mood to give more detail about your problems with Approval Voting I'd value that input. It's a topic I have been casually glued to for years, without getting deeper on the analytic side.
  
  That's literally my reason. Approval voting doesn't let you express any preference. If we had approval here in Australia, my vote for Labor would be exactly equal to my vote for the Greens. And I don't want that to be the case. I want my vote for the Greens to be worth more than Labor.
  I think approval is likely to hard quite an extreme degree of moderating effect. Some moderation is good, for sure. Compulsory voting has a beneficial moderating effect. But with approval voting, it's likely that the Greens would never win a single seat, even when they're popular enough to win the election under IRV. Because all Greens voters will also approve of Labor, if they vote strategically in an effort to avoid the LNP winning. But some Labor voters might not approve of the Greens even if they would preference the Greens ahead of the LNP.
  The other systems I mentioned disliking, "range voting" (one example of which is a system called "STAR") are worse, because they devolve into approval. If you could force everyone to sit down and vote 100% honestly it would be brilliant, but it's just as easy to vote strategically as FPTP is, by voting all maximum or minimum, with no nuance—i.e., approval. Only it's worse than approval, because some people might not recognise this and make their vote weaker by choosing not to vote strategically. Like how people in FPTP voting third party hurts their preferred major party.

Your list implies the US does VAT. It's one of the only places that doesn't.
- Instead we have sales tax, and that is actually assessed by the states individually. The Federal government's income is primarily from income tax and various business taxes.
  
  Sales tax has quite a different origin and reasoning behind it than VAT, though.
- Not having VAT is stupid.
  Only having it on luxury goods is a ballache.
  What's a luxury good? A neckless? What about a cheap wedding ring? Okay fine all jewelry to make instead simple.
  Cars? Just take the bus. Driving is a luxury and will make way more in revenue than jewelry, but that won't be passed.
  Running shoes aren't a luxury. But what high end fashionable "running shoes"? What about a high end push bike used to get to work, what about the same bike used for fun.
  Fuck man you would end up dealing will so much crap trying to work it out it would cost you more than it makes. Just tax rich people more for being rich and let them spend it how they like.

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.

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.
- but corporations are people in America, so this would never fly without abolishing that first.
  
  Oh yeah I definitely mean kill that.
- This is literally the rule currently
- Too slow, I want it all now!

As a US senator, that list looks like COMMUNISM to me.
- As a person with a functional understanding of government and economics, this looks like ethical social capitalism to me. Privately owned production funds government-allocated programs dispersing resources more evenly over the population while still allowing a high upper limit to wealth.
  
  As a person with a functional understanding of government and economics
  Sorry, this doesn't overlap with US senator at all. Go back to the USSR, you red devil.
- If your constituency could read they'll be very upset

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.
- Great list overall but I'm wondering what you mean by reasonable behaviors in regards to having kids or not? I understand the notion of encouraging and discouraging behaviors by legislation, but that can be difficult to negotiate/implement.
  
  Honestly I included both because I wanted to include people who elect not to have children. Currently, the child credits are in place to strong arm people into having children, and there is no upper bound on the number of children it covers. This can really be a financial impediment for people who either have chosen not to have children or have not been able to. Conversely, families who elect to have an arbitrarily large number of children end up placing a disproportionately larger burden on social infrastructure. They elevate the load on schools more than other families, they consume more food than other families, etc. By tuning the how the parameter is calculated you can provide some refund for having no children, increase it to a point for small numbers, then level off or even reverse it as the number increases. Thus this provides some economic benefit for people making the very ecologically and financially rational decision not to have children, still helps ease the financial burden for people who have small numbers of children, and holds people who incur a higher social burden by their decision have many children. I am specifically leaving out numbers on these as the moral and ethical decisions of what constitutes 'few' and 'many' for this discussion are something that can and should be actively debated to determine the social validity. Also, it could be done in a way which would allow the tuning to be adjusted based on social needs for population growth.

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.

You forgot abolishing slavery.

Also tax the rich.
- The last 2 items on the list help with that.
  
  They don't address the main issue though. The wealthiest people hide all their money in stocks and then use those stocks as collateral to get incredibly cheap loans.
  
  I think taxes on financial shenanigans like carried interest, inheritance, and capital gains would probably be more effective than taxing luxury goods. Most rich people don't actually spend the majority of their money on physical things. Mostly they just shuffle it around into various instruments to avoid taxes and maximize returns.
  
  Chuck it in again for good measure. You can never tax the rich enough.

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
- OR have a mandatory specialist/professional input throughout the process
  People on the internet don't like to hear this, but that's called Lobbying.
  
  While this is true, I probably should have added additional context as it may be lobbying but differ in the way lobbying is currently done.
  It would preferably be someone currently working in acedemia as well as holding an office (state or federally) subject to a code of ethics etc. With prerequisites within the field of question.
  Now each judge or policy maker having their own expertise would be ideal, it's not really practical/feasible at this time. It's not necessarily lobbying in it's entirety that's an issue more so how it's done currently.
  One could argue any person with any statement to a judge or policy maker (I'm context) classifies as lobbying since they are trying to sway the decision in their way. So by definition there's not really a way around "lobbying" but we can mitigate the (effectively) statement bribes we have screwing our system

Forced retirement of politicians at whatever the national retirement age currently is
- Now that is a quick way to make the retirement age 120...

idk about merge the senate into the house. I like the idea that there is one chamber where each state has the same number of votes and one that goes by population. but hard agree on removing the house rep cap, as-is every branch of the fed is weighted toward smaller, more rural states (senate, house with rep cap, potus via electoral college, scotus because senate and potus pick scotus)
- If you address gerrymandering, the Senate/House divide is less important (but still important).
  Keep the Senate. Make filibusters back into what they were intended as, unlimited debate. You have to have someone in the chamber talking the entire time. The filibuster was intended to allow everyone to talk. It was not intended to hold up bills forever.
  
  Make filibusters back into what they were intended as, unlimited debate.
  hard, throbbing agree there. this thing where one congressmonster sends an email that says "I'm gonna filibuster this" and then everyone gets the rest of the day off for cocktails and footrubs is a gross perversion of what it was intended for.

"Abolish corporate personhood" doesn't go far enough. Abolish corporations. Companies over a certain size should be forced to convert to either a worker-owned co-op or a non-profit organization. Human society needs to evolve past being centered around maximizing shareholder profits.

All excellent ideas.
Now how do we afford to bribe all of the politicians to make this happen?

There should be something in there about universal free education

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.

You forgot land value tax. Otherwise it's looking good.

Term limits on SCOTUS should be 18 years, with one Justice retiring every other year.
Unless the court expands, then the term limits could be shorter
- Yeah, 10 years is too short. 18 sounds pretty good. I'd also want to give them a full retirement. Ostensibly, they'd be less likely to sell influence.

Abolish capitol punishments
Codify body autonomy

Why do you post an image of text?
- Stonks.
- I don't know the answer in this specific case, my best guess is visibility, although you might read text posts I would take a guess and say the majority of users of sites such as Lemmy and Reddit only look at the images before interacting with a post. So an image of text would garner more interaction than the same content in a text post.
- Op, next time please post text of an image that has just text in it.

I would add patent law reform, and remove the ability to hold private and public office (ie you can't be a board member of Monsanto and be on the EPA), oh and no campaign donations allowed; everybody gets an equal stipend to campaign, we have the internet you don't need to go shaking babies and kissing hands.
- I love dreaming up patent law reforms. I think my favorite so far is related to the purchase of patents.
  When a corporation purchases a patent, they are put on a 5 year clock to bring a product to market which materially includes the content of the purchased patent. After 4 years they are able to appeal for an extension by showing demonstrable towards market, but only twice (so they have 15 years total). If they do not bring a product to market, or are not able to satisfy the extension criteria, the patent reverts to the original creator without refund.
  No... More... Burying... Innovation... That... Threatens... Your... Profits.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting
Star voting to avoid some of the potential negative outcomes of RCV
Do not merge the house and Senate. They perform different, but equally important functions, once you remove the house cap and force them to start legislating again.
Remove the illegal revision done by a single person to statute 1983 of the federal code, in 1874. This removes Qualified Immunity, and resets the law back to, "naw fam, no one, not even a Sitting President, Congressman, or SCOTUS Justice is above the law, and no one has any sort of immunity." If you need immunity to do the job, the job shouldn't be done.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/us/politics/qualified-immunity-supreme-court.html
It also follows that congresspeople can now be prosecuted for insider trading, and SCOTUS justices can be prosecuted for accepting bribes.
- Star voting is just FPP dressed up in a costume. And RCV's prescribed problems only occur in strict math environments that don't look at why voters flow to the candidates they flow to. I wouldn't be surprised if Star was being pushed to kill RCV by the big parties because they know they can dominate it just the same due to the actual psychology of voting. (I want to vote for my favorite, but what if the guy I hate wins?)
  
  Looking at it this is definitely the case, its no better than fptp because you're incentivized to give 5 stars to all candidates you can tolerate, and none to others.

One more.
Now that corporations aren't people, only people can own residential land.
- Can we also ban stock buybacks and limit CEO pay?

Probably get rid of the supreme Court altogether and have cases that it currently hears be heard by a random selection of federal judges.
Probably also need to get some people smarter and more specialized than me to figure out how to capture the wealth of the wealthy. Like the whole "take out a loan against your assets, use that as money, pay no taxes" thing needs to go.
While we're having fantasies, can we expand the 14th amendment "no insurrection " bit to be more clear?
And if we're feeling spiteful, add a "no one who has held office as a member of the Republican party shall be eligible for any role in government, nor any role that engages with the government such as contractor, advisor, lobbyist." Just gut the whole party.

Fully funded public news media with a legal firewall between government interests and that media. Controlled by journalists and representative members of the public. We desperately need to get working interests back into news media, nearly every flavor of our media is currently owned by corporate interests.

I'd vote for you

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