You missed a very important one, fix the main reason billionaires don’t pay any tax:

Using your unrealised gains (e.g. shares) as collatoral to take out loans should be considered realising those gains and thus subject to capital gains tax

Not American, but I would add some severe roadblocks to anything that makes basic housing an “investment”.

I will take 1 of those, watered down and neutered, and it would still make more sense than the landfill fire we live in right now.

idk about merge the senate into the house. I like the idea that there is one chamber where each state has the same number of votes and one that goes by population. but hard agree on removing the house rep cap, as-is every branch of the fed is weighted toward smaller, more rural states (senate, house with rep cap, potus via electoral college, scotus because senate and potus pick scotus)

You’re missing some voting reform, but full props for putting voting reform at the top of the list.

Some suggestions:

1. Make voting day a national holiday.
2. Make absentee voting without an excuse a national standard.
3. Enable repeat voting where only your last vote “counts”, allowing absentee voters to change their minds.
4. Ban states from announcing vote totals until all votes are in, preventing people from voting with more knowledge than others.
5. Make allowing people who have served their time in prison to vote a national standard.
6. Overturn the recent SCOTUS ruling about the 14A actually applying to Federal office.

There are no financial reforms on this wish list, which are necessary to make these other reforms stick:

• Abolish PACs
• Implement campaign finance limits
• Implement campaign public funding
• Curtail/abolish lobbying

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.

You forgot abolishing slavery.

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.

You have a point of merging the Senate into the House.

I’m a fan of Australia’s federal voting system. We have a house of Representatives where the country is divided into 151 regions by geography of roughly the same number of people. One in Sydney is a few suburbs, the one in the south of northern Territory is almost the whole territory excluding Darwin.

Then there’s the Senate, where each State gets to elect twelve(six every 3 years[1]) Senators. Territories (Australian Capital Territory & Northern Territory) elect Two Sentors every election.

Everyone in the state gets a say in who represents them as Senators and allows minor parties to get representation as only 16% of the total vote is needed to get a seat. (The Greens typically get 1-2 of seats in each State)

So for areas with geographic issues get to have a say (rural people vote for the National party who represent farmers interest).

And there’s the occasional independent who gets in too and some other minor parties.

The other major difference is we have optional fully preferential voting. You can nominate anyone running in your seat as your first preference on voting day and you give everyone on your ballot a number from 1 to however many. When the Australian Electoral Comission counts the votes if the person you put first is eliminated from the count (they only get 175 votes from the 110,000 who cast a ballot), then your voting slip still counts and your vote transfers to your second choice.

Also we have compulsory* voting here. If you are enrolled, you are required to vote and will get a small fine if you don’t. *You might think all politicians are bastards and cast an unfilled ballot paper into the box, but you have had your ability to have a say. I’ll also note that people may take the time in the polling booth to draw a penis on their slip which isn’t illegal and doesn’t invalidate the vote a long as the intention for who is being voted for is clear. There are also prepoll stations and an option to postal vote exists.

We also have a tradition of voters getting a “Democracy Sausage” after voting. It’s common that voting stations (elections held on Saturdays) are schools and local clubs have barbecues and sell cakes etc as part of fundraising.

In summary, I like out two house system as the Senate allows minor parties to get representation where they wouldn’t otherwise if we just had the House of Representatives. [1] we sometimes have double disillusion elections where the government has the options to call one if they keep passing legislation in the house and the Senate keeps rejecting it and in that case all seats are vacated and the states elect 12 Senators, but it’s not normal.

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 not 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

Just add tax brackets up to 99% and have graduated lending taxes

1. Ranked choice voting is great, yes please.

2. Why? Explain your reasoning. Voting needs reformed, but this isn’t the way. I certainly don’t want NY and LA deciding every election ever.

3. No. Why? What on earth would this accomplish. The house and senate are separate for a reason. We need the checks and balances they provide.

4. Again, why? The house reps are by population of the state/district. We don’t need MORE bureaucrats.

5. Yes, please. US “healthcare” is in shambles. It’s a complete disaster and the only people that benefit are Insurance companies.

6. I get the idea, but it’s a terrible idea. Fixing the rest will even out the income situation. Turning ALL your citizens into entitled brats is not a great idea.

7. Absolutely not. Eliminate mail in voting except in extreme cases that need to be applied for. Instead, institute a FREE Govt Issued photo voter ID. Expand voting areas and hours. Make Voting day a paid holiday. I don’t wanna hear any racist shit about “poor black people can’t find the voting places”. Bullshit. Make AT LEAST one HS Gym a voting area in every county. Make it EASIER to vote in person. It’s a duty, honor, and responsibility for people to vote.

8. , 9. , 10. , 13. Soft Disagree. Our tax system no doubt needs an overhaul. You’ll have everyone “making” more than $50 getting around it somehow. Look into the Fair tax. Eliminate ALL taxes. embedded, import, state, local, federal, income, capital gains, etc. implement a level sales tax on everything. Don’t want to pay taxes, don’t buy shit. everyone pays their FAIR share that way, and there is no way for the rich to get out of paying. This would eliminate the IRS and ‘tax preparation companies’. Which I don’t really understand this issue with those companies. No one is forcing you to use them. And there is absolutely NO WAY i want the IRS doing my taxes FOR me. fuck all that noise. But again, implement the fair tax and IRS goes away anyway.

9. Lifetime appointments are bogus, but i think i a role like SCOTUS, longer terms are required. I read something here about aging out and I like that as an option.

10. sure, on board.

11. Guess i don’t really understand this. Explain?

Plenty of other things. Term limits for congress.

Make congress abide by the rules they set for us including insurance, healthcare, stock trading etc. While we’re at it, create a congressional village of sorts. You’re assigned a house/duplex/dorm etc while you are SERVING in congress. no more “NEED” to have a house in DC and in your home state. If congress people can’t survive on their $150k a year salary, what hope do the rest of us have?

Eliminate lobbyists. That’s just “legal” bribery.

We need to fix immigration. having an unbridled flow of people come across the border isn’t good. I have no problem with people wanting to come to this country, but there’s a reason we have a limit. There needs to be a complete overhaul of the process.

Make secondary education WAYYYY more affordable, or free.

Stop giving out so much foreign aid, and close military bases anywhere they are not directly needed around the world. we are not the world police. you can’t pour from and empty cup and our cup is empty to the tune of 30some TRILLION dollars. Once we fix our money problems, then we can start handing it out again.

Start holding government officials, included law enforcement accountable. End qualified immunity. Start enforcing laws we already have instead of the glut of new ones every single year.

DEMAND that congress pass a balanced budget every year. no more of this dog and pony show of ‘govt shut downs’. If the govt shuts down, those in charge should be fired and replaced by people willing and able to perform the duties they were elected to do.

Allow Cities, Municipalities, States etc to SAVE money. By that I mean, don’t treat yearly budgets as “use it or lose it”. We as citizens are told to save, save, save, yet every govt entity spends every dime they have every year so their budget doesn’t shrink the next year. Putting safeguards into place so the money can’t be used as bonuses etc would allow govt entities to have a “rainy day fund” per se.

Eliminate the words “school lunch debt” from our vocabulary. Feed children that need it. and feed them good food. not the radioactive waste that gets slopped up in school cafeterias across the nation.

Eliminate the ability for the govt to use Social Security like their own little piggy bank. If they INSIST on using the money, it needs priority in repayment @ the tune of 150% of money borrowed. This would be the mandatory first thing on the following year’s budget.

If we can afford to send people to war, we need to be able to afford to take care of them afterwards.

This is just off the top of my head. The problem is nearly every “solution” here would require people in power to give up that power. That’s not going to happen easily or quitely.

I think literally all you need is ranked choice voting and the abolishment of corporate personhood and for profit lobbying. The rest will take care of itself.

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).

A lot of these are impractical.

For example you have a lot of expenses, but you also want to remove most VAT. But you’re also freeing up income for the more poor. You don’t need to overdo giving poorer people money, it needs to be enough, not too much. There’s better ways to invest that money, for example into increasing the quality of said universally health care. You can always increase the tax on higher brackets to extreme numbers and making transferring money out more difficult.

Likewise, while I am fully behind abolishing company personhood, it is, sadly, absolutely impractical. It should happen, but it won’t.

And likewise, a separate senate can be useful, it just needs to be used differently. The idea is to have a second - smaller - group that can essentially send bills back to the bill-writing group for purposes such as “this is worded too broadly” or “this is too partisan” and so on. They cannot actually change law, they’re there to make sure that changes to law uphold a certain standard of writing and specificity.