For more discussion and your own suggestions you can post in https://lemmy.world/c/policy
Text post rather than image of text https://lemmy.world/post/13834866
No, you missed a very crucial point:
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.
How about ending step-up basis and have the taxes in gains taken from the estate before inheritance?
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.
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.
I agree with everything here. Do I need to move to a different instance?
No, this is the democratic far left wishlist, which I think is core lemmy. Good luck getting it done. Once you step over that line, you may want to find another instance.
lemmy.world is not far left by any stretch of the imagination
Not far left, democratic far left. I’m no talking about leftist, I’m just talking about the lib left.
Asking again if you would make a community for this, as it would be nice to discuss each point individually and for others to add points.
Thank you!
PLEASE MORE PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION, I BEG YOU
all my homies hate cars
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...
PLAN:
List everything
Fix everything
Looks solid!
Prohibit the owning of residential property by all non-individuals, and require individuals to have a minimum of a 70% minimum residency requirement on the one residential property they own.
Age cap on all elected positions.
The total elimination of all for-profit war manufacturing.
A wealth cap set to some reasonable percentage above the poverty line.
Immediate trials for crimes against humanity for all existing billionaires and most C-level employees of all energy, "defense", pharmesutical, utility, media, and mass conglomerate corporations.
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.
There's a movement called Georgism that advocates for abolishment of all taxes, except for a land-value tax. ("Land" being any extractive natural resource use.) It's really the only fair tax system. At the risk of oversimplifying it: All wealth comes from a combination of natural resources and labor. Natural resources belong to all of humanity, so it's not fair to give ownership of them to well-connected individuals or firms to profit from extracting and selling them. On the other side, an individual's labor is the only thing that people have that's entirely their own. It's not fair to tax individual labor, like an income tax, as nobody else should have any claim on its value. Thus, the taxes to run a society should come from the use of humanity's limited store of natural resources/land, rather than have value which belongs to us all disappear info the pockets of a few individuals, while most people must work to justify their existence while the value of that labor is siphoned away.
It is a beautiful philosophy, but the issue with a land tax is that it is regressive, meaning the poor pay a larger portion of their income than the rich. If you look at detached suburban homes, from 100m² single floor starter homes to 1000m² mansions, the size of the lot is about the same. If you look at high density urban housing, a skyscraper full of luxury condos uses less land per occupant than cheap multi-family homes.
It seems to make the most sense in Soviet style ultra high density housing where the poor live 4 to a shoe box while the rich have luxury country estates.
Capital in the form of machines, buildings and tools is also important in the creation of value.
Why a land tax? Many (most? all?) towns and cities have a real estate tax.
Good question because I think land value is important.
Pretty much every country in the west has a housing shortage. There is no free land anywhere downtown so you can't just take some land and build on it for free.
With real estate tax. Let's say you have 3 patches of land around the central railway station downtown. You have huge office building on one, you have a old, crappy by modern standard, home and you have a vacant lot that the owner can't be bothered doing anything with. They all get taxed three different amounts. In fact by taxing them different amounts you are encouraging the market to devalue assets on that land to minimise their taxes.
If taxes were based on the value of that land it would incenitivise you to maximise the space. So a 1 person home would end up paying 10x that of a 10 home apartment complex per home. Low cost housing would be cheaper, lavish estate homes would be costlier.
If you want a market oriented fix to the housing crisis, to low density, to lack of public transport, for people buying land and sitting on it doing nothing, for rich people not paying taxes on thing and just holding onto wealth they have inherited. Then land value tax solves all these issues, or at least encourages it.
(I still think corporations should be able to own homes. It's a fantasy to expect the hosuing system to be better without it. But I does need fixing LVT is a way to help fix it).
youd be better off making a plan to seize power.
those measures are good and all but your current kings wont let it happen.
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.
I feel like that could backfire. The antivax movement would use it to try and kill off all compulsory vaccinations leading to a resurgence in otherwise rare diseases. ERs would hesitate to perform lifesaving operations without consent over fear of being sued later.
Then there is the question of who makes bodily autonomy decisions for children and people unable to make decisions for themselves. If parents, you could see an increase in religiously motivated mutilations. If the state…
A few years ago I would have said the courts would impose sanity over these extremes but that no longer applies.
The vast majority of these will not come to pass if the government is not in active fear of revolutionary change. That is the only time they will be convinced to budge from the status quo.
A similar thing happened in the 30s in the US. Most people don't know that FDR was a trust fund kid and the inheritor of a fortune. The only reason he did the reforms was to prevent the country from going commie. Enough of the other capitalists fell in line. Those who didn't, tried to install a military dictator, it's called the Business Plot. Some of the smarter ones founded the John Birch Society, created various nonprofits, and selected religious leaders to empower with bags of cash. From there they slowly created the media, education, religious, and cultural right wing ecosystem that claimed the political system in the 70s.
If we don't want a similar claw-back of power we need to ensure it doesn't happen again. We need to make sure no one is capable of corrupting media, education, religion, and culture at such a scale. I'd argue we need to eliminate the ability for people to own the means of production. After that is done almost every other problem we have as a society will be easier to manage.
Robocalls should be opt-in unless emergency broadcast. Examples for TTY or other systems typically via text/email for vision impaired.
I don't think they mean services people subscribe to.
Wow that's a lot
Even if you got elected on that platform, you'd be lucky if you could push even one of those things through in an entire political career, even if it's something popular that the people want.
It's a classic trap for the newly elected who promise the world and then realised that 99% of politics is horse trading and backdoor deals with beltway insiders
End qualified immunity for cops, increase minimum training requirements, and institute federal licensing scheme to increase accountability, along with mandatory malpractice insurance coverage.
None of these standards are more strenuous than the ones I have to meet for my non-LEO job.
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
It used to be the equivalent of $24.
I feel like it should be tied to inflation and cost of living
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.
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