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.
General Discussion
Welcome to Lemmy.World General!
This is a community for general discussion where you can get your bearings in the fediverse. Discuss topics & ask questions that don't seem to fit in any other community, or don't have an active community yet.
🪆 About Lemmy World
🧠Finding Communities
Feel free to ask here or over in: [email protected]!
Also keep an eye on:
For more involved tools to find communities to join: check out Lemmyverse!
💬 Additional Discussion Focused Communities:
- [email protected] - Note this is for more serious discussions.
- [email protected] - The opposite of the above, for more laidback chat!
- [email protected] - Into video games? Here's a place to discuss them!
- [email protected] - Watched a movie and wanna talk to others about it? Here's a place to do so!
- [email protected] - Want to talk politics apart from political news? Here's a community for that!
Rules
Remember, Lemmy World rules also apply here.
0. See: Rules for Users.
- No bigotry: including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
- Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
- Be thoughtful and helpful: even with ‘silly’ questions. The world won’t be made better by dismissive comments to others on Lemmy.
- Link posts should include some context/opinion in the body text when the title is unaltered, or be titled to encourage discussion.
- Posts concerning other instances' activity/decisions are better suited to [email protected] or [email protected] communities.
- No Ads/Spamming.
- No NSFW content.
What would it take to actually get ranked choice voting? That would need a constitutional amendment right?
Wealth tax. You forgot that one. Otherwise every billionaire will suddenly make $49,999 in salary.
IRS shouldn’t be filing taxes for anyone, that just seems egregious given that there so many ways to justify lowering one’s tax burden. I am not sure if a third party bureaucracy would be incentivized to do that for tax filers.
If you have extra deductions you can regise it. Otherwise, they come up with a tax return they’re satisfied with.
Death penalty for lobbyists.
Money =/= speech
Way way way better than the first one!
Something something.. gerrymandering
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.
Land back
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
Exactly. NOTHING can be done without abolishing lobbyist bribery first. Also, reps must answer constituents first. Corporations last.
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.
Ranked Choice Voting? 100% approve.
Get rid of the EC entirely. The popular vote would work quite a bit better as a means of ensuring power is exercised with the consent of the governed.
Scotus and congress both desperately need oversight that is different from 'we oversee ourselves and find we did nothing wrong' when obvs. that doesn't work too well
Tax prep companies... I wish them a prompt and thorough viking funeral.
Fun fact about corporate power at the time of the framers: the colonists felt first-hand the abuse of being effectively governed by crown corporations and shortly after the founding of the USA, corporations were drastically limited in what they could do- for example, they could not engage in politics, they could not own other corporations, could not engage in activities strictly related to their charters, had charters of finite span, and their charters could be revoked for any violations. If corporations are going to be people today, it's about damned time we started charging them with crimes when they commit crimes- and yank their charters if they re-offend.
One thing worth questioning: do we really need representative districts? Why not have at-large representatives on a per-state basis, with seats allocated to states/apportioned via census? It would be pretty hard to gerrymander an at-large system, I think
On your last question, while changing reps to at-large would certainly help with gerrymandering, that would make it more difficult for reps to have solid relationships with their constituents. It benefits both the constituents who don't have to travel as far(although phone calls and emails would still theoretically work) to connect with their rep, but also allows the rep to tour their area more frequently and be able to handle specific, local issues more effectively. There are tradeoffs with everything though, so it might work better overall. It's just so hard to change the status quo, which goes for most things that people have listed here.
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.
If you could achieve 1 thing on this list you could do all of them.
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 new appointees every 2 years on a non-election year. If a Justice is removed or leaves before their term is over the interim Justice in 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.