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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.
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.
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.
Abolish capitol punishments
Codify body autonomy
No tax reform? It’s a great start to make taxes easier for most individuals but we shouldn’t be allowing wealthier people to pay less percentage of taxes. There’s a bewildering array of complexity that doesn’t matter to most individuals but only serves to lower the tax rate if people who can afford to take advantage of it
Whats a luxury item for purposes of VAT? You’ll be hung up forever on that.
For example cars:
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).
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.
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.
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.
this is the easiest one to fix. Stop letting the current party draw voting districts.
Have a government bureaucratic department do it, like in civilized countries. Have rules for it, and have it be accountable to the DOJ (or similar).
I would go with computer generated district lines based on population, with some sort of non-partisan or bipartisan zoning committee to review and approve them, but there are tons of workable solutions. The problem is both parties benefit from gerrymandering, so there's no political will to fix it. The solution is simple, but not easy.
Don't forget to abolish slavery.. wait forgot they call it prison now.
Not a single comment here has said give up the guns. It's like everyone is fine with the uniquely American problem of mass shootings...
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.
Depends on what time-scale. Sweeping changes all in one go would be asking a lot, and none of these are minor changes on their own, either.
RCV first. After that, everything gets easier.
angry John Hancock noises
There are no financial reforms on this wish list, which are necessary to make these other reforms stick:
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.
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.
Ranked choice voting systems are cool but I have a lot of doubt about it actually changing much in the way of who ends up in government. The government is filled with people who align quite neatly with the people who participate in party primaries.
It always seems like a thing that people imagine is going to result in their preferred government. Really though it is the voters you disagree with and the system mostly (if somewhat imperfectly) reflects their desires.
If you want (for instance) more left candidates to get into office, you have to start at the bottom and build a big bench of left candidates with proven track records who have a base of support. You can’t air drop a socialist into the potus race and expect voters to catch up with you. Stategic voting is a small problem, not voting is a much bigger one.
Nobody votes third party because it's pointless. That in turn means new parties have no reason to exist. Once it was actually possible to vote for a third party while still making a choice between the top 2, people would do that, and options would appear.
I’m not even sure this is true. Certainly many people do vote third party, since they do get votes. Are there actual statistics on this or just online anecdotes?
I can only give personal anecdotes:
Yeah, I understand how it works. I’m just don’t believe that strategic voting is really holding back candidates that I might like better. I think other voters are turning up to dem primaries in greater numbers.
Like I said, I like ranked choice, let’s do it. But, be prepared to see very little change.
Without switching to multi-winner elections, the voting system will do very little. My preference is Approval Voting for single-seat elections and Proportional Approval Voting for multi-winner elections.