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.
Instead of all that, just one thing. Start there and everything else will unfold from it: remove private corporate money from politics. All contributions to a politician or political party to be public and capped, per citizen.
but corporations are people in America, so this would never fly without abolishing that first.
I would add patent law reform, and remove the ability to hold private and public office (ie you can’t be a board member of Monsanto and be on the EPA), oh and no campaign donations allowed; everybody gets an equal stipend to campaign, we have the internet you don’t need to go shaking babies and kissing hands.
I love dreaming up patent law reforms. I think my favorite so far is related to the purchase of patents.
When a corporation purchases a patent, they are put on a 5 year clock to bring a product to market which materially includes the content of the purchased patent. After 4 years they are able to appeal for an extension by showing demonstrable towards market, but only twice (so they have 15 years total). If they do not bring a product to market, or are not able to satisfy the extension criteria, the patent reverts to the original creator without refund.
No… More… Burying… Innovation… That… Threatens… Your… Profits.
Wouldn’t the ban on tax preparation companies hurt mostly the middle class? The rich can just get full time accountants to handle all their finances, and these accountants will also optimize their taxes as part of the general service they provide.
The IRS actually wants to make tax prep easier. Companies like TurboTax and the like are predatory.
They lobby congress to keep taxes complicated. All to milk people for $20-$35 each at tax time. Many countries either file taxes for you or make it super easy.
Think about it. You do your taxes and send them in… but the IRS sometimes sends out corrections. I’ve received MORE sometimes and others get audited to pay more. That means the IRS knows what you owe already…
Ideally it would be similar to basic online tax prep. But posted by the IRS (which has started already!!!)
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.
Conservatives are poisonous
What do you mean? I don’t disagree, but it’s not easy to convince them of that, sadly.
I consider it conservative to instantly dismiss a list of solutions to real problems. “That’s impractical” is typically translated to “I’m far too fucking lazy to think about that topic, let’s leave things how they are”
Hrm, okay? You yourself really drank the Conservative koolaid though if you can only think in black and white with no further nuance.
Everything is a trade-off in life. Every solution costs something else. Its funny that you accuse someone who couldn’t be less conservative if they tried of that, just because I would like to actually change something, not just talk about it - and hence need workable solutions not utopian ideas. Though as I said to the op, on an utopian level I agree of course.
Right you instantly dismissed solutions but I’m the conservative. I understand tradeoffs but I read your comment. It was dismissive
Okay, well then in that case it really wasn’t meant that way but I’m also not a native English speaker. 😞
Thanks for clarifying. I appreciate this response and I hope I wasn’t too rude with mine.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting
Star voting to avoid some of the potential negative outcomes of RCV
Do not merge the house and Senate. They perform different, but equally important functions, once you remove the house cap and force them to start legislating again.
Remove the illegal revision done by a single person to statute 1983 of the federal code, in 1874. This removes Qualified Immunity, and resets the law back to, “naw fam, no one, not even a Sitting President, Congressman, or SCOTUS Justice is above the law, and no one has any sort of immunity.” If you need immunity to do the job, the job shouldn’t be done.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/us/politics/qualified-immunity-supreme-court.html
It also follows that congresspeople can now be prosecuted for insider trading, and SCOTUS justices can be prosecuted for accepting bribes.
Star voting is just FPP dressed up in a costume. And RCV’s prescribed problems only occur in strict math environments that don’t look at why voters flow to the candidates they flow to. I wouldn’t be surprised if Star was being pushed to kill RCV by the big parties because they know they can dominate it just the same due to the actual psychology of voting. (I want to vote for my favorite, but what if the guy I hate wins?)
Don’t forget mandatory voting.
Making everyone vote even if they don’t really care means that working your supporters up into a frothing rage doesn’t work. They’re already all going to turn up. If you want to actually win elections, you suddenly have to win over the middle.
I don’t think mandatory voting is a good solution. This is mostly practices in autocratic/dictatorial states, and would have a bad taste to it.
What should be done is to either make voting day a public holiday (with mandatory “half day off” rule for anyone who would still have to work in retail or services), or just move it to a Sunday, like many other countries have done ages ago.
Australia is a dictatorship?
Ranked choice (also known as instant runoff or IRV) is barely better than first past the post (which is plurality voting). A better choice is 3-2-1 or STAR voting, both of which outperform IRV by a huge margin. But even if those are too complicated for people, Approval voting is still better than IRV.
I’m a big advocate for approval voting.
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.
Social democracy leaves power in the hands of the capitalists, they only tolerate reforms like this when capitalism is threatened, and they will (and have) eroded as soon as the threat is gone.
TIL america has a VAT…?
But yeah, other than that, this list makes too much sense for most people. they will shit on it because 1) they have no imagination and 2) they don’t have enough knowledge to see that each point actually has a reason and seems to have been given a fair amount of thought
No it doesn’t, I think it should have a VAT that is specifically for luxury items like yachts and private jets.
I see. I read it as “make the vat only apply to luxury goods”
