For more discussion and your own suggestions you can post in https://lemmy.world/c/policy
Text post rather than image of text https://lemmy.world/post/13834866
No, you missed a very crucial point:
- Make it illegal to post screenshots of text posts instead of just the text.
I’d say end private student loans, not federal, and develop a program for automatic forgiveness and universal higher education.
Most people most of the time should be able to get as much education as they care to get, courtesy of the public. For everything else I could see deferred interest federal loans with a procedure for automatic forgiveness. (Went to Cambridge but then came back to the US to live and work? Should cost you as much as going to a state University, just more paperwork)
I’d also like easier immigration, and much more lax work visa standards. Right now people can get taken advantage of with the H1B program, since deportation for unemployment is a pretty strong incentive to put up with bad work conditions.
Mass transit buss, train, continuous across the country (inter/intra state, city, etc…)
Pedestrian and bike infrastructure, continuous and shielded from motor vehicles, in part or supplement to all main roads, highways, etc…
End and roll back privatization of public services
Universal pre-K
After school activities funding
Safe third places for teens/young adults (malls? Pools? Idk what kids are into these days)
Free adult education (community college subsidy, Library programs, etc…)
Etc…
I used to work for the U.S. Department of Defense and can confidently approve of massive defense budget cuts and merging of several military branches. This is only a single and relatively minor anecdote, but it is a small piece of a much larger problem and is one I can share from personal experience:
I used to be the government lead for a highly successful defensive capability that only consisted of myself and 2-3 defense contractors. We outperformed several long-standing projects that had 10x the staff, 100x the budget, and had been around for approx 10 years without going operational (“operational” in this case meaning that intelligence analysts are authorized to provide actionable intelligence derived solely from the tool). My team released 3 operational releases within 1 calendar year from the start of contract.
I don’t say this to disparage the staff of the other project(s), but rather to highlight how the government can afford to cut long-standing under-performing projects and become more lean and efficient. The government funding allocation is often in the realm of $300k/yr for a single FTE. Multiply that by a team of 20-30 that works on a project that is shelfware after 8-10 years.
My same project was approached by numerous branches of the US and FVEY military community. Branch A offered tons of money to put it on a ship; branch B offered even more money to put it in the back of reconnaissance aircraft or fighter jet; branch C offered money to make it man-packable for ground troops. US taxpayers already paid for this capability once (my team and myself) and we made it as unclassified (i.e. disseminable) and modular as possible (it was literally designed to run on a general host computer running Linux), yet each branch was willing to fork over tens of millions of dollars for something they could have installed on a $2k computer using some internal software repository. And that’s what I suggested they do.
Again, this is just one minor anecdote. How often does this happen where taxpayers are forced (being that they have absolutely no control over how the defense budget is organized) to pay for the same (perhaps MUCH more expensive) tools e.g. 5-10 times because military branch A, B, C, etc, want their own flavor of the same thing? Why does the military often have pissing matches of authority when there is so much overlap between some of them? Take away their stick by taking away some of their funding, and force them to share and cooperate.
I agree with everything here. Do I need to move to a different instance?
Why a land tax? Many (most? all?) towns and cities have a real estate tax.
You forgot long term capital gains tax. There is no reason that the investor class should be paying a flat 15% tax. Critics will quickly jump up to say that we need to incentivise people to make long term investments in businesses, which I agree with, so short term capital gains should be taxed like gambling winnings.
Also, minimum wage can be addressed with a one time bump and after that, make tax brackets, 401k contribution limits, etc. multiples of the federal minimum wage.
Why a land tax? Many (most? all?) towns and cities have a real estate tax.
Good question because I think land value is important.
Pretty much every country in the west has a housing shortage. There is no free land anywhere downtown so you can’t just take some land and build on it for free.
With real estate tax. Let’s say you have 3 patches of land around the central railway station downtown. You have huge office building on one, you have a old, crappy by modern standard, home and you have a vacant lot that the owner can’t be bothered doing anything with. They all get taxed three different amounts. In fact by taxing them different amounts you are encouraging the market to devalue assets on that land to minimise their taxes.
If taxes were based on the value of that land it would incenitivise you to maximise the space. So a 1 person home would end up paying 10x that of a 10 home apartment complex per home. Low cost housing would be cheaper, lavish estate homes would be costlier.
If you want a market oriented fix to the housing crisis, to low density, to lack of public transport, for people buying land and sitting on it doing nothing, for rich people not paying taxes on thing and just holding onto wealth they have inherited. Then land value tax solves all these issues, or at least encourages it.
(I still think corporations should be able to own homes. It’s a fantasy to expect the hosuing system to be better without it. But I does need fixing LVT is a way to help fix it).
Robocalls should be opt-in unless emergency broadcast. Examples for TTY or other systems typically via text/email for vision impaired.
I don’t think they mean services people subscribe to.
Prohibit the owning of residential property by all non-individuals, and require individuals to have a minimum of a 70% minimum residency requirement on the one residential property they own.
Age cap on all elected positions.
The total elimination of all for-profit war manufacturing.
A wealth cap set to some reasonable percentage above the poverty line.
Immediate trials for crimes against humanity for all existing billionaires and most C-level employees of all energy, “defense”, pharmesutical, utility, media, and mass conglomerate corporations.
Asking again if you would make a community for this, as it would be nice to discuss each point individually and for others to add points.
Thank you!
Wow that’s a lot
Even if you got elected on that platform, you’d be lucky if you could push even one of those things through in an entire political career, even if it’s something popular that the people want.
It’s a classic trap for the newly elected who promise the world and then realised that 99% of politics is horse trading and backdoor deals with beltway insiders
Another text image!
PLAN:
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List everything
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Fix everything
Looks solid!
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Abortion is important, but constitutional amendments are difficult so let’s make it count: bodily autonomy. This includes abortion but also assisted suicide, personal drug use, tattoos, gender reassignment, and much more.
I feel like that could backfire. The antivax movement would use it to try and kill off all compulsory vaccinations leading to a resurgence in otherwise rare diseases. ERs would hesitate to perform lifesaving operations without consent over fear of being sued later.
Then there is the question of who makes bodily autonomy decisions for children and people unable to make decisions for themselves. If parents, you could see an increase in religiously motivated mutilations. If the state…
A few years ago I would have said the courts would impose sanity over these extremes but that no longer applies.
People already do medically unnecessary genital mutiliaton to babies (circumcision). Parents have autonomy over their children until they reach the age of reason, or they become legally adults. I think pregnancy would have to create legal adulthood.
ER and Good Samaritan laws already indicate that when unresponsive, consent to save a life is implied. You can do CPR on an unresponsive person without repercussions.
For the vaccines, people should definitely be free not to do it, but then they are not admitted to public school. They are quarantined when they go to a hospital. They cant travel on airplanes or public transit. Just like you’re free to get face tattoos but some people might not want to look at you. Should we outlaw face tattoos? No, that should be unconstitutional. I don’t have a face tattoo and I don’t think anybody should, but I would fight for their freedom to make their own choice. It doesn’t have to be a good decision, it just has to be their own decision.
Of course there are details to hash out and decide in the courts, but that is the case with all good rights, even freedom of speech.
You are more optimistic than I am. I worry a particularly “slanted” Supreme Court might interpret school vaccine requirements, quarantine, etc. as coercive violations of bodily autonomy.
Maybe if the amendment had a limited public heath exception and some protections for doctors. But the wording would be tricky.
After what China allegedly did during Covid, I think we should think very carefully about the specific conditions of a legalized and forced quarantine.
Yeah, that’s why any exception would have to be narrow and carefully worded and I’m not even sure it would be possible.
Both risks are pretty bad. Make the protections too strong and people will abuse the privilege. Too weak and governments will abuse the exceptions.
Eh, maybe I’m overthinking it. Even the first amendment is understood not to protect certain kinds of speech. Although sometimes I wonder if those exceptions could survive if directly challenged in our modern situation…
Well in the fears you’re describing I’d rather err to too much freedom. Like in most situations if somebody doesn’t want a vaccine, doesn’t want to wear a helmet, doesn’t want to whatever it doesn’t impact me in any way. And I don’t want them trying to legislate the specific grey zone that makes abortion illegal. It’s clear as can be. If it’s not your body, it’s not your choice. If it is your body, it is your choice.
Sometimes those choices have consequences sure. Like wearing a helmet can be a condition for riding a motorcycle on a federally funded road. Just like having a license or wearing a seat belt. Being vaccinated can be a condition for sharing a confined space with others in public. There could be tax breaks for being vaccinated, for example. But I believe very strongly in bodily autonomy, with almost no exceptions.
The biggest thing to spell out would be about parental control over children. Parents want full control but I don’t even think they should have it. That would be heteronomy. I think bodily autonomy rights should protect babies from medically unwarranted circumcision. I think babies and children should be protected from unwanted tattoos too. Just like kids are protected from child abuse. There can’t be a minimum age for this human right, you have the right when you are old enough to express it. There are children who want to get vaccinated without parental consent and that should be allowed.
Wait, do we actually ban tattoos somewhere in this country?
In South Carolina it’s illegal to tattoo above the neck.
(E) It is unlawful for a tattoo artist to tattoo any part of the head, face, or neck of another person.
Oh for fuck’s sake. Up to a year of imprisonment?!
I guess nobody has been prosecuted for tattooing eyebrows or permanent makeup yet.
The vast majority of these will not come to pass if the government is not in active fear of revolutionary change. That is the only time they will be convinced to budge from the status quo.
A similar thing happened in the 30s in the US. Most people don’t know that FDR was a trust fund kid and the inheritor of a fortune. The only reason he did the reforms was to prevent the country from going commie. Enough of the other capitalists fell in line. Those who didn’t, tried to install a military dictator, it’s called the Business Plot. Some of the smarter ones founded the John Birch Society, created various nonprofits, and selected religious leaders to empower with bags of cash. From there they slowly created the media, education, religious, and cultural right wing ecosystem that claimed the political system in the 70s.
If we don’t want a similar claw-back of power we need to ensure it doesn’t happen again. We need to make sure no one is capable of corrupting media, education, religion, and culture at such a scale. I’d argue we need to eliminate the ability for people to own the means of production. After that is done almost every other problem we have as a society will be easier to manage.
Voting holidays tend to be a problem because many of the people least able to take time to vote would be considered “essential” and still end up working on the holiday.
Better to make voting holidays entirely unnecessary by relying on vote by mail and a week long opportunity to drop of ballots at secure locations.
Also, you might be able to simplify the voting method a bit by just requiring a candidate to win a majority (not plurality) of the votes. This would encourage districts to explore alternatives to first past the post because otherwise they would constantly need runoff elections.
Voting day being a holiday would be mostly symbolic. It also helps to ensure that there is no discrimination around the UBI bonus for voting. If an employer forced an employee to work on voting day then it would be grounds for a lawsuit because it’s a holiday. And yes, there would be weeks to vote by mail and vote early in person ahead of the actual voting day.
