Removed by mod
I see the value in an odd number of branches. That’s the only one that I don’t support. Can’t have two branches fight. We need an odd number for a tie breaker.
Universal vote by mail? No. I can imagine several situations where votes “go missing” or “suddenly appear” and any investigation would have a really hard time finding evidence.
There should be something in there about universal free education
I’ve always heard that abolishing corporate personhood would make them untaxable. I don’t know for sure, but I imagine you’d have to be very careful with that one. That said, I understand the general goal, and I’m for it.
Whoever you heard that from knows even less about tax law than I do.
“I’ve always heard…” followed by “I don’t know for sure…” are the hallmarks of a comment that should have never been written in the first place.
See edit.
One more.
Now that corporations aren’t people, only people can own residential land.
Can we also ban stock buybacks and limit CEO pay?
Not American, but I would add some severe roadblocks to anything that makes basic housing an “investment”.
Add in an office for a publicly owned rail system.
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?
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. If 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.
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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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.
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.
Here here.
FYI, it’s “hear, hear” as in, hear this, hear this.
Heir heir
Hair hair
Har har
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.
You can cover a lot of gender and abortion issues, with a right to elective medical care.
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
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
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.
second-term presidents having expanded power seems scary. otherwise this all seems cool. any ideas about reforming lower federal judge appointments by the president?
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.
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
Jury duty for judges. Interesting thought!
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.
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.
Social democracy leaves power in the hands of the capitalists, they only tolerate reforms like this when capitalism is threatened, and they will (and have) eroded as soon as the threat is gone.
Individual rights get eroded if people don’t keep the good fight. The hope for a system that can prevent the amassing of power in the hands of a few through no effort by the many is entitled childishness personified.
If you prevent the swelling of power Capitalists regularly achieve, then people can maintain that good fight.
Begging the capitalist class to give you more crumbs is not the good fight.
The good fight involves distributing the source of their power, control over the means of production, to the people.
Lots of good stuff here, and I agree with others to keep the senate. Abolish the filibuster!
No more first past the post elections and so break the duopoly
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.
state rep cap
What you’re looking for is “the congressional apportionment amendment”, and it was passed by congress with the bill of rights, and ratified by many states but every time they almost met the 3/4ths threshold a new state was admitted, and it always remained short. 11 states have ratified it. It had no expiry and as such is still waiting to be ratified by the states. It needs 27 more ratifications to become an amendment to the constitution.
