Does this plan make sense? v2

FYI, it's "hear, hear" as in, hear this, hear this.

Ooh ooh I love these.

Wouldn't this have the effect of increasing rent by 10% of the cost of the property each year?

I live in a rural area. Surrounding my humble 2 bedroom home are a few acres of rocks and cliffs that are vacant land with a well I have to run a small pump to get water from. The county already taxes me on this vacant unbuildable land as separate property.

I live a very simple life and make just under median income so not rolling in money by any means. If i were to get taxed on this undeveloped land as an investment it would make it unaffordable for me and I'd have to sell for less than I could afford a new home. How is this preventing land hoarding?

What happens if you have a streak of single term presidents, with no new judges appointed?

I would rather see a lottery system implemented. Every year, the oldest standing percentage of judges gets retired and replaced with randomly picked judges out of a pool that meets certain requirements (these can be debated). No election, no appointment, using an auditable system, and participation is compulsory, with strict restrictions of what activities the judge is allowed to participate in while serving so that they're discouraged from staying on term too long.

second-term presidents having expanded power seems scary. otherwise this all seems cool. any ideas about reforming lower federal judge appointments by the president?

You understand, I appreciate you. Realize you are thinking for yourself and you represent an individual who would make the world a better place if you speak loud.

You can still expand the seats and ensure that reps have roughly an equal number of constituents for a state wide race.

I'm pretty sure if you got rid of "the stock market" it would immediately be reinvented.

"Hey, I need money to start my CatChat app. If you invest, I'll give you part of the company"

"Cool."

"Hmm.. I bet I could sell parts of this to the public the same way"

Maybe the worst parts wouldn't be reinvented right away, but those are the things that need to actually go. High frequency trading, weird nonsense that's not actually creating value, etc

That's an interesting idea. I've found personally that every time I've worked for a publically traded company I've hated it because everything is just about increasing share price no matter what. OTOH I think investment is very useful for progress though... I'm not sure how investment would work without ownership

The problem with that is that will cause areas to drive up housing prices to expand the untaxed group to general more "upper middle class" to price out undesirables and draw in higher earners as a form of tax break. This already happens without the tax bracket scaling and would probably get 10x worse.

I don't have a great alternative, but maybe a weighted CoL combined with 0% below median income in the district? Something like that, but that would probably cause low CoL areas to pay way more taxes. Maybe I am thinking of it wrong.

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.

This is very interesting, but I'm struggling to see how it would work within our current system of single-district representatives. Would Congressional Districts be abolished, and each state pick their allocated Congressmen through Approval Voting? I also don't see what benefits Approval Voting has over Rank Choice Voting other than simplicity.

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.

Yes, but I think that's more of a problem with our politics rather than the senate. The Republicans have gone to political extremes that just aren't popular with the majority of the country, so they struggle to pass legislation that their base would approve of through the House. Instead, they adopted a culture of obstruction in the Senate, because blocking legislation is all they can do. There are ways that their ability can obstruct can be limited, like abolishing the filibuster, but changing the culture of extremism is the only long-term solution.

Ending gerrymandering is probably the biggest institutional fix towards that goal. Right now, Congressional Districts are basically giant echo chambers that amplify the most extreme voices. Breaking down those chambers and forcing politicians to appeal to a plurality of random voters should bring rhetoric down to sane levels, and that should apply to both the House and the Senate.

the way this works in australia is that election day is always a sunday (i think? or saturday?) but you can early vote at any number of larger polling stations without giving a reason… also postal vote

but given your name, maybe you know that? :p

Or, you know, just have mail in voting available nationwide.

It also forces the government to make voting easy.

No it doesn't. I could easily see Republicans making voting very difficult under such a system, particularly within zip codes that vote for Democrats. This would punish Dem supporters who failed to vote, and would generally make the public hostile to mandatory voting - which would help build public support for the abolition of such mandatory voting

The government is only incentivized to make voting easy if all major parties are loyal to the public. That isn't the case in the United States

Australia is a dictatorship?

Even if they’re responsible for policing themselves, you’d get a huge improvement by making them write it down. We shouldn’t have Clarence Thomas claiming he didn’t know that accepting $100k+ is an obvious conflict of interest.

My company has no problem writing down ethics policies for me - I’m sure they’d let the supremes copy it. We even have regular training to clarify edge cases that Clarence Thomas claimed to not understand. I’m sure they could subscribe to the same service

Gotta include their spouses/immediate families, honestly should probably have audits on close family/friends who may be a proxy for their investments.

There are multiple kinds of ranked choice voting. The "popular" one in America right now is IRV, but you shouldn't assume all ranked choice voting algorithms are IRV and hence share its flaws (and benefits). My personal favorite RC algorithm is Ranked Pairs. I am not familiar with STAR.

I think you misunderstand what ranked choice is. You may be thinking of proportional voting, where seats are divied based on the relative percentage of support a party has. That would eliminate Gerrymandering. Ranked choice is just a method of runoff voting for a single seat. It's still very much subject to Gerrymandering.

I guess, so the law at present seems mostly made up. Like, it can't deal with glaring issues without a precedent and what amounts to a long-winded ritual before significant issues are considered.

I guess I don't see why a corp can't be accountable like how some people who commit petty crimes are 'held accountable' (i.e. shot, killed, worked in labour camps).

Yeah I guess if I could add free time and money and make it so everyone is happy I would add it.

People in flyover states do have legitimate concerns that are not priorities in California, Texas, and New York. Massively increasing the size of the House solves the problem with the tiny states where there are fewer people per representative in the small states, while preserving some power for them in the Senate.

If you only did representative by population, Wyoming and Vermont would essentially be cut out of the national political process entirely. The tyranny of the majority can be a dangerous thing.

From the tyranny of the majority. Each state is equally represented in the Senate, versus the House where states are apportioned seats by population.

That would mean electing parties and the parties choosing the specific candidates. That works until party interests are so entrenched that you cannot get any new representation without standing up an entire new party.

I have been also, but I'm open to STAR and 321. The main reason I like AV is because it would short circuit two party dynamics completely.

What you described is an "expert advisory" not a "lobby".

Lobby (n): a group of people seeking to influence politicians or public officials on a particular issue.

Expert (n): An expert is a person who is very skilled at doing something or who knows a lot about a particular subject.

Advisor (n): An adviser is an expert whose job is to give advice to another person or to a group of people.

A lobby has no prerequisite of knowing a damn thing about the topic they are trying to influence on, hence why we have lobbies related to women's health that think women can hold their period.

Abolish lobbies and place stringent criteria on advisory groups requiring that they reasonably demonstrate competence in their advisory field, are only allowed to advise on specific narrow topics, have to be recertified every N years, all advisory actions on subjects not related to national security are public record to be made available and on an indexable public access database (including what the subject was, what the advice was given, who requested the advice, who gave it, and a list of all officials/staffers who received it), and are not allowed to engage in financial transactions with sitting or recently retired Congressional officials or staffers. In this case, I would say "recently" would be on the order of 10 years.

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.

But not in the same way that actual proportional representation works. They're distributed by population yes, but they're tied to a geographical location. Real proportional representation is national. So you have one legislative body tied to a district they're supposed to represent, and another tied to the base of voters across the country that elected them.

Sales tax has quite a different origin and reasoning behind it than VAT, though.

That's literally my reason. Approval voting doesn't let you express any preference. If we had approval here in Australia, my vote for Labor would be exactly equal to my vote for the Greens. And I don't want that to be the case. I want my vote for the Greens to be worth more than Labor.

I think approval is likely to hard quite an extreme degree of moderating effect. Some moderation is good, for sure. Compulsory voting has a beneficial moderating effect. But with approval voting, it's likely that the Greens would never win a single seat, even when they're popular enough to win the election under IRV. Because all Greens voters will also approve of Labor, if they vote strategically in an effort to avoid the LNP winning. But some Labor voters might not approve of the Greens even if they would preference the Greens ahead of the LNP.

The other systems I mentioned disliking, "range voting" (one example of which is a system called "STAR") are worse, because they devolve into approval. If you could force everyone to sit down and vote 100% honestly it would be brilliant, but it's just as easy to vote strategically as FPTP is, by voting all maximum or minimum, with no nuance—i.e., approval. Only it's worse than approval, because some people might not recognise this and make their vote weaker by choosing not to vote strategically. Like how people in FPTP voting third party hurts their preferred major party.

Not any more than it does now. Ignorantia juris non excusat. Ignorance of the law excuses not. It is a primary doctrine in US law as it stands, I don't see why this case should be any different.

My personal flavor of this idea could down to this: if your company is found guilty of a criminal offense that would result in jail time for an individual, all board members and C-level executives are held accountable and face the same punishment as an individual would for the same crime. The only exceptions are:

• There was an intentional malicious effort made on the part of a subordinate to use the law to attack their employer.
• It can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the illegal activity was perpetrated on by a subordinate in a manner that would have expressly and reasonably obfuscated the activity from the notice of a rational, attentive observer.
• The illegal activity brought lethal harm upon the company (meaning that the activity directly lead to the complete and total failure and dissolution of the organization and all subsidiaries and shell companies were dissolved as a result)

Outside of those 3, they asses go to jail, assets get seized, and yahts go up in police auctions.

I mean bigger things, like Philips knowingly selling CPAP machines they knew were defective and would cause cancer and god knows what else. They knew, didn't recall, continued selling anyway, people died. Nobody is in jail, though.

Fuck that, jail the fuckers.

A similar case can be made for Boeing and many others.

Start jailing execs and companies will start paying attention

It works really well for Venezuela.

As a person with a functional understanding of government and economics

Sorry, this doesn't overlap with US senator at all. Go back to the USSR, you red devil.

Oh yeah I definitely mean kill that.

Honestly I included both because I wanted to include people who elect not to have children. Currently, the child credits are in place to strong arm people into having children, and there is no upper bound on the number of children it covers. This can really be a financial impediment for people who either have chosen not to have children or have not been able to. Conversely, families who elect to have an arbitrarily large number of children end up placing a disproportionately larger burden on social infrastructure. They elevate the load on schools more than other families, they consume more food than other families, etc. By tuning the how the parameter is calculated you can provide some refund for having no children, increase it to a point for small numbers, then level off or even reverse it as the number increases. Thus this provides some economic benefit for people making the very ecologically and financially rational decision not to have children, still helps ease the financial burden for people who have small numbers of children, and holds people who incur a higher social burden by their decision have many children. I am specifically leaving out numbers on these as the moral and ethical decisions of what constitutes 'few' and 'many' for this discussion are something that can and should be actively debated to determine the social validity. Also, it could be done in a way which would allow the tuning to be adjusted based on social needs for population growth.

They don't address the main issue though. The wealthiest people hide all their money in stocks and then use those stocks as collateral to get incredibly cheap loans.

I think taxes on financial shenanigans like carried interest, inheritance, and capital gains would probably be more effective than taxing luxury goods. Most rich people don't actually spend the majority of their money on physical things. Mostly they just shuffle it around into various instruments to avoid taxes and maximize returns.

Chuck it in again for good measure. You can never tax the rich enough.