General Discussion

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...

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.

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.

Carbon tax, eliminate cheap/free parking, congestion tax in cities. Using the roads and causing noise/danger to others while polluting should never be cheaper than using public transportation (not counting parking, which should be it's own private cost not passed on to society).

Specifically, Nordic Model for prostitution.

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.

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.

if you want to make this a real project: some of your items are clearly actionable and fairly self-contained. for example STAR voting is pretty well defined. other ones, not so much. “abolish the filibuster” and “end religious tax exemption” have inumerable possible implementations where many of the nuances will have far reaching implications.

would be interested in this project being separated out into a separate community to avoid spam and start seeing what legislation lemmy comes up with. call it lemmyslation (patent pending lol). maybe put the legal code on github? idrk how github works.

Robocalls should be opt-in unless emergency broadcast. Examples for TTY or other systems typically via text/email for vision impaired.

I agree with everything here. Do I need to move to a different instance?

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.

Collateral for loan is realised gain. Nice. I always wondered what a good mechanism against that kind of tax cheating would be.

I like it, so I know it'll never happen. Some gun control would be nice too. And $20 fed minimum is probably too much