I’m impressed with this, someone has clearly given it more than 30s of thought
treating unrealized gains used for collateral as income avoids most of the complicated issues around wealth taxes while still enforcing that you have to pay your fair share if you want to live a life of luxury.
Congressional pay caps seem like a good way to align their incentives with helping all their constituents rather than just the donors and median mean that passing a real minimum wage law is to their direct benefit. No idea how you would get around the increased risk of bribery though.
Fixing gerrymandering, replacing fptp and scrapping the electoral college evens out the voting power so an election is less likely to be swung imby a handful of close districts in swing states.
Striking down Citizens united would (could?) clean up campaign finance making it harder for fossil fuel lobbies (for example) to purchase power.
I don’t know how feasible it is given some of it is federal, some of it is state level and I imagine some of it requires ammending the constitution, but I would consider any candidate who ran on some/all of these to be a good choice focused on fixing the root causes of a lot of the problems the US is facing.
Non-American here: is it possible to objectively outlaw gerrymandering while still having the ability to redraw/create/merge districts?
I thought you do need that mechanism as populations shift from rural to urban (or reverse) so that it’s always the same number of people per congressperson or however it works.
Also non-american but subject to a bunch of us-centricn news anyway 😅
Good question you need to be able to re-draw boundaries, but re-drawing boundaries shouldn’t have a material effect on election results (assuming the same people vote the same way.
I have heard a few proposals like “districts must be regular polygons” or avoiding moving people from contested seats into safe seats.
Neither of them are perfect for a number of reasons (reliance on perdictive models, ways to work around etc.) so the common approach is to appoint an independent redistricting commission to handle it and have them look at a bunch of metrics to figure out if it’s fair.
The main problem is that a few states passed ballot initiatives to combat gerrymandering, the politicians then undermined or straight up ignored them and then in 2019 the supreme court decided that it wasn’t within the jurisdiction of the federal courts to hear cases around gerrymandering. Funnily enough every single one of the justices who decided they were fine with republicans germandering efforts were appointed by republican presidents who could have guessed?
So now it’s de-facto legal; states run by the democrats are doing similar things and the clearly-acting-in-good-faith pundits on the right are screaming “look both parties are the same see! See!”
Err… I may have strayed from my point a little, but yes IRCs are the way to do this provided they have sufficient legal backing to see that their decisions are enforced.
I’m impressed with this, someone has clearly given it more than 30s of thought
treating unrealized gains used for collateral as income avoids most of the complicated issues around wealth taxes while still enforcing that you have to pay your fair share if you want to live a life of luxury.
Congressional pay caps seem like a good way to align their incentives with helping all their constituents rather than just the donors and median mean that passing a real minimum wage law is to their direct benefit. No idea how you would get around the increased risk of bribery though.
Fixing gerrymandering, replacing fptp and scrapping the electoral college evens out the voting power so an election is less likely to be swung imby a handful of close districts in swing states.
Striking down Citizens united would (could?) clean up campaign finance making it harder for fossil fuel lobbies (for example) to purchase power.
I don’t know how feasible it is given some of it is federal, some of it is state level and I imagine some of it requires ammending the constitution, but I would consider any candidate who ran on some/all of these to be a good choice focused on fixing the root causes of a lot of the problems the US is facing.
Non-American here: is it possible to objectively outlaw gerrymandering while still having the ability to redraw/create/merge districts?
I thought you do need that mechanism as populations shift from rural to urban (or reverse) so that it’s always the same number of people per congressperson or however it works.
Also non-american but subject to a bunch of us-centricn news anyway 😅
Good question you need to be able to re-draw boundaries, but re-drawing boundaries shouldn’t have a material effect on election results (assuming the same people vote the same way.
I have heard a few proposals like “districts must be regular polygons” or avoiding moving people from contested seats into safe seats.
Neither of them are perfect for a number of reasons (reliance on perdictive models, ways to work around etc.) so the common approach is to appoint an independent redistricting commission to handle it and have them look at a bunch of metrics to figure out if it’s fair.
The nice thing is a perfect solution isn’t even necassary for improvement, just preventing horrorshows like Texas’s 33rd (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas’s_33rd_congressional_district) would help.
The main problem is that a few states passed ballot initiatives to combat gerrymandering, the politicians then undermined or straight up ignored them and then in 2019 the supreme court decided that it wasn’t within the jurisdiction of the federal courts to hear cases around gerrymandering. Funnily enough every single one of the justices who decided they were fine with republicans germandering efforts were appointed by republican presidents who could have guessed?
So now it’s de-facto legal; states run by the democrats are doing similar things and the clearly-acting-in-good-faith pundits on the right are screaming “look both parties are the same see! See!”
Err… I may have strayed from my point a little, but yes IRCs are the way to do this provided they have sufficient legal backing to see that their decisions are enforced.