Does this plan make sense? v2

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

Here here.
- FYI, it's "hear, hear" as in, hear this, hear this.
Add in an office for a publicly owned rail system.
It’s pretty simple, just have a new real estate investment tax that is only levelled on residential properties you own but do not reside in, and that tax needs to be set at a rate higher than the property market is expected to gain. E.g. (with made-up numbers) if the property market gains 5% value per year on average, set the tax rate at 10% of the value per year. There’s an insanely slim chance you can still make money on the investment, but 99+% of investors would dump their properties immediately, leading to a massive crash where average people could suddenly afford to buy the home they’ve been renting.
- Ooh ooh I love these.
  
  Wouldn't this have the effect of increasing rent by 10% of the cost of the property each year?
The problem with that is there is a very clear policy purpose and interest in making housing an investment - the vast vast majority of people will eventually own a home, and it is a forced savings vehicle because people are REALLY bad at saving for retirement. Even if you fix our lack of a social safety net, home ownership is generally seen as a public good because it encourages people investing more in and caring about their community, being willing to pay higher taxes to support more services, etc. It's not a no brainer to make housing an investment (there are arguments against in a society with a good social safety net), but it is very purposeful through good public policy. It has little to do with the recent (very recent, relatively) buying up of single family homes by investment banks, etc, despite people implying all the time it's some secret cabal and shadowy wealthy figures doing it for their own benefit. Everyone sees conspiracies everywhere these days.

Of course, if we're going to say that home ownership is "good" and keep doing all the tax incentives for it, we do need to stop corporations speculating and driving up housing costs, and could do so by some targeted taxes on unoccupied properties in the same portfolio. But there's an argument to be made that that's a relatively small portion of the problem, since a lot of our housing stock issues can be traced back to single family zoning issues, as well as road and highway funding leading to suburban sprawl and unaffordable newly developed subdivisions while cheaper starter homes don't exist anymore...but either way affordable housing stock just hasn't kept up.
Agree a thousand percent. Some ideas:

No corporate home ownership

If multiple properties are owned they must be run as a non-profit

Move to a land-value tax so that holding undeveloped land as an investment is not viable.
- 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?

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.

Here’s my Supreme Court fantasy:

Every president appoints one justice, but only in their second term if reelected. Fuck cares how many justices there are at any given time.

Here’s the catch: There’s no term limit and technically no age limit… but in order to qualify, any nominee must have served at least 20 years as a federal judge and have another 15 years in the legal system (as a judge, attorney, whatever), for 35 years total experience. Oh and they should have a law degree, since that’s not a requirement right now lol.

This way you get someone with a judicial record to consider at confirmation hearings, and make sure they’re incidentally old enough that they’ll die or retire relatively soon in case they turn out to be fucking horrible.
- 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?
The problem with the Senate is that it gives land more power than people. The weight given to a Senate voter in a less populated state like Montana is like 40x that of a voter in a state like California. Abolishing the Senate would move the power of each voter closer to equality. Anti-gerrymandering measures would get you the rest of the way there.
- 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.
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.

This needs to be more.

Fix the education system to promote children. Feed and nurture them. Give them healthy foods to fuel their minds. Feed them 3x a day if needed. Stop allowing the people to decide if this should be covered by taxes.

Eliminate grade blocks (tiers, years, whatever) so kids that excel and not be hampered by kids that don’t want to be there. I was so bored until grade 5, then someone recognized my abilities and fostered them. I was the class clown and acted out because i was bored until I was shifted into a different class which was advanced in every way. If I show top grades, maybe I shouldn’t be held back because little Tommy the bully is a dipshit (he deserves to learn at his own pace).

In later years, remove redundant classes and replace with trades for students that are not excelling. Teach them viable skills. No one needs to have history classes in high schools, unless it serves a purpose. The only option for someone with zero skills should not be military school.

And for the love that is all wholly educational, pay our teachers so much better. Promote teachers that show drive (regardless of student year). Also mandate continuing education for them.

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

And while we’re at it, let’s take into account the total wealth of your stock holdings when you realize gains. There’s no reason poor and middle Americans should pay the same tax on their capital gains as billionaires.
Oh god yes
Why stop there? Why keep the stock market at all? It's only real purpose is for the rich to play games with their wealth, to distribute wealth towards themselves, etc. People shouldn't be making a living off of speculative investment at all. Jobs should contribute to society. Owning is not a job.
- 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 worst part is unrealised gains from selling shares you don't own? Until a company is bankrupt? But then keep that company alive as a zombie so you never have to pay any tax or explain how you sold more shares than existed? See Sears and toys r Us.
I like this. If you use something as collateral, then it means the lender has assigned some amount of value to that thing and now you have a number that you can apply taxes to.

Income up to $50k untaxed.

I wouldn't set a hard number value for this. Make it based on how low income is defined, or something dynamic that can change over the years with inflation.

For example, in parts of California you could be making $80k and you would still be considered low income because of how expensive it is just to live there. After paying for housing, there won't be much left over.

At minimum, tie it to inflation. But better yet, tie to cost of living and housing prices in a district.
- 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.
Or to GDP, so lower income people will benefit from increase in productivity via lower taxes?

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.

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

I think we already know what people have higher needs and have been historically marginalized and exploited. Instead of relying on private funding, we can have the state employ people to work on the project of "leveling the playing field". that committee or bureau would be transparent to the public and have elected positions within it but not be ultimately ruled by those elected officials. we could have people with verifiable community backgrounds employed on a regular and/or contract basis. this could allow work with regional groups and even more granular than that. basically i imagine providing them grants and resources to get the pulse of the communities they serve and channel that info back through. the people that know how best to serve local communities are the advocates within them.
You'll need a constitutional amendment or a radical change up in the Supreme Court to abolish PACs. That's considered a free speech issue. I am not sure I have high hopes of a constitutional amendment being passed in our lifetimes.
And shadow pools, and SEC very-obvious-not-even-hiding-it corruption, and financial institutions with way to high random frees, limit banks profiting short-term so much from eg monetary policy changes, etc.

Ban variable width fonts

angry John Hancock noises

Actually pretty close to the Electoral College part. The National Popular Vote currently has 205 EC votes across 16 states, it would need at least 65 more to go into effect at which point there would never be an outcome different than the national popular vote winner becoming president ever again.

Examples of presidents who lost the popular vote:

Donald Trump - Margin 2,868,686 (−2.10%)

George W. Bush - Margin 543,895 (−0.51%)

Benjamin Harrison - Margin 90,596 (−0.79%)

Rutherford B. Hayes - Margin 254,235 (−3.02%)

John Quincy Adams - Margin 38,149 (−10.44%)

For anybody wondering who won against Bush in the Good Timeline, it was Al Gore. The guy who realized Climate Change was an existential threat to us all back before the ice caps started flooding the atmosphere with methane.

It hurts to see you have to explain the Bush v Gore stuff. I was a kid but I remember living through it pretty vividly.
Simply removing/raising the cap on House of Representatives would give us most of the benefit - representation could be closer to actual population and electoral college presumably matches.

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).

You're never going to eliminate gerrymandering without switching to proportional representation. I prefer to use Sequential Proportional Approval Voting, which is just Approval Voting with extra steps.

My two suggestions for OP are:

Simplify and focus the list. It's too long and touches too many different topics. Also, when you do have a full list with every topic, separate them by category.

As stated above, use Approval Voting and Proportional Representation.
- 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.
this is the easiest one to fix. Stop letting the current party draw voting districts.

Have a government bureaucratic department do it, like in civilized countries. Have rules for it, and have it be accountable to the DOJ (or similar).
- 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.
Doesn't removing electoral college remove the need for zones?

Or is that a problem on local county levels as well?
- 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.
I would have agreed on the Senate 20 years ago. But it has so clearly become the stick with which about 15 percent of the country beats the entire rest of the country.

At some point you have to call it as an abusive body.
- 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.

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.

If you do that, make sure it's a guaranteed public holiday or have laws in place to ensure workers can get time off to vote.
- 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 has more advantages than just the ones you describe, although even that alone is good enough reason to do it.

It also forces the government to make voting easy. To put them at a time when a maximum number of people can make it (in Australia elections are on a Saturday, when most people are not working—prepoll is also extremely easy to do they just ask you if you're unable to vote on election day, without requiring any actual proof, and postal voting not much harder than that). To have numerous places to vote within easy access of where everyone is.
- 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
This website is disgustingly authoritarian. Force people to vote? Fucking christ.
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?

Supreme Court should be subject to ethics laws and rules, not exempt from them

Rules adjudicated by whom? You'd need another independent judiciary specifically tasked with overseeing the SCOTUS, and there's a lot of reasons why that would be a dicey proposition.
- 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

Missing:

Disallow corporate campaign donations

Politicians prohibited from owning stocks

Not just owning stocks but prohibited from all markets. The options market is not the stock market, neither are futures or currency markets, bond markets, etc. They have the power to manipulate all of these and should be barred from all forms accordingly.
- Gotta include their spouses/immediate families, honestly should probably have audits on close family/friends who may be a proxy for their investments.

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

Some suggestions:

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

Yeah, would probably like to see ranked choice swapped out for something else too. My preferred tool is STAR, but there's a lot of other options. The biggest benefit of RC is it isn't as bad as what we have, which is good, but it isn't great.
- 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.
The issue with point 3 is the vote would no longer be anonymous
- No, because we already track if you vote or not. Here is an example procedure:
  
  Each time Agnes Nitt sends in her vote, we put the sealed envelope in the Agnes Nitt pile. This is what we do with or without repeat voting, because it is illegal for Agnes's vote to count twice - we must record that she voted!
  
  Each time Agnes Nitt sends in a new vote, we incinerate any envelopes in her pile (unread) and replace with the new one.
  
  When we hit count time, whatever envelope is in the Agnes Nitt pile is handed to the vote counters, in exactly the same fashion whether or not we have repeat voting.

I have a few to add.

Gerrymandering eliminated nationally with mathematically randomized district maps with approval required by all major parties and a non-partisan committee, not just the majority party. If no map can be agreed upon, the non-partisan committee gets final say.
(This is more of an amendment to the elimination of the electoral college one...) States do not vote for president, people do. And no person's vote should matter more or less than another because of the state they live in. Therefore, the person elected president is the one who wins the popular vote nationwide.
The sectors of medicine, pharmacy, education, produce, and communications (cellular and internet) should always have well-funded state providers in the same competitive space as any private option. No part of the nation should be without access to any of these public services in a reasonable distance.
Abortion is added as a constitutionally protected right.
An exact definition to the limits on the executive power, privileges and protections of the President.
Ethical rules for Supreme Court Justices with an oversight process (with teeth) to enforce them, with consequences ranging from mandatory recusals for conflicts of interest, to removal from the bench.
Single purpose bills without any tagalong laws attached to them only.
No bill should be brought to vote until enough time has passed since its publishing that both members of congress and the public have had time to thoroughly read and discuss its contents.
A naming convention for bills that does not allow for names that are blatantly attempts at misleading, meant to evoke emotion, or just marketing gimmicks and "clever" acronyms. No more "P.A.T.R.I.O.T.", "Stop W.O.K.E", or "D.R.E.A.M." acts.
A pathway to cutting the military budget to a fraction of what is is today. Maybe a 10 percent reduction in budget each year for 8 years?

the non-partisan committee gets final say.

good luck with non-partisan

States do not vote for president, people do

mu funding fathers! /s

The sectors of medicine, pharmacy, education, produce, and communications (cellular and internet) should always have well-funded state providers in the same competitive space as any private option. No part of the nation should be without access to any of these public services in a reasonable distance

That's communism /s (or socialism? I don't know, I agree with you, I'm just thinking what the other side would parrot out). Also, mu (lack of) competition! Think of the poor shareholders! (also /s of course)

An exact definition to the limits on the executive power, privileges and protections of the President.

with an added clause that says "if you look for a loophole, it means you're automatically wrong. Don't be a dick"
~~gerrymandering is rendered obsolete by points 1 and 2 on the list...so that's already included in the OP ;)~~

~~the reason gerrymandering is a thing, is because of the first-past-the-post/winner-takes-all voting system, which ranked choice replaces.~~

~~ranked choice allows propotional representation, which also fixes the 2 party problem!~~

~~edit, also fixes your point 2, because under ranked choice there is only a popular vote (also just known as "a vote", because there isn't any other one left)~~

nvm, got something mixed up...shouldn't comment when half asleep...
- 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.

MORE PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION

Removing the house rep cap (more particularly adopting a plan similar to The Wyoming Rule) would be a fantastic idea and allow the house to return back to what it should be, populace representation. As the electoral college is based on combined reps and senators, this also does a fair bit towards resolving the underlying issue there.

Corporate personhood is what allows you to sue a corporation and enter contracts with it. Removing it would not be the best idea with that in mind. The courts have allowed that to go further then it should vis a vis allowing contributions to political campaigns etc. Revert Citizens United and we're largely good.

if one allowed the IRS to file taxes for citizens you wouldn't need to ban tax prep companies since the amount of people buying their products would fall off a cliff.

This is only workable if you also eliminate gerrymandering. Otherwise The party that's in charge initially will turn it into an enduring uni party across the whole country.

The 10 year term limit for the Supreme Court is trouble. With 9 justices, one party in power for 8 years, which happens often, is more than enough to ideologically set the tone.

I don't mind term limits per se, just not such a short limit.

Lock the number of justices at 9. Have an 18 year term limit with a rolling new appointee every 2 years on a non-election year. If a Justice is removed or leaves before their term is over the interim Justice only serves out the rest of that position's term. Appointees cannot serve more than a 24 year term to give interm Justices a chance to continue serving if they were appointed during the last years of another Justice.

There's for sure still flaws under that system but it's not exactly upending the position like a 10 year limit does. Also it should keep the court within the prevailing opinion of the country without it being overly politicized since appointments happen in non-election years.

Police reform. Abortion protection. Web neutrality. Data privacy. Gender affirmative care protection. Legalized weed. Minimum wages tied to inflation, on top of UBU. If we're getting crazy.

substitute inflation with CPI: that’s what we do in australia… inflation is a finance term that kinda doesn’t represent cost of living: you’re seeing that in the US right now i believe where your inflation is actually not terrible, but your cost of living is crazy

CPI does introduce some BS though because it’s not exactly a specific set of rules… we had an issue recently where the govt set CPI lower than what people thought it should be and everyone was pretty outraged
You can cover a lot of gender and abortion issues, with a right to elective medical care.

I'd be okay with keeping the senate. I think the founding fathers had a good idea, Senate was meant to be more "Long term sustainability" while the House was meant to deal with the needs of now.

However, Term Limits. They didn't see senators sitting on their seats until they were over 90 years old. In their day if you made it to 40 you were apparently doing really well.

If you made it to 25 or 30 (age requirements for congress), 40 was not a surprise. A person then was considered old at 65-70, so younger than now, but not much

i think one small addition

decrease influence of ~~bribing~~ lobbying

abolishing corporate personhood would effectively do this, since that's the primary justification for legalizing corruption in the USA.
- 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).
Why not just add 1. Everyone gets free money and is happy all the time
- Yeah I guess if I could add free time and money and make it so everyone is happy I would add it.

Rather than abolish the Electoral College and merge the House and Senate, I would suggest massively increasing the size of the House. This would increase the size of the Electoral College too, reducing the distortion of the population while still protecting less populous states. This also has the advantage of being something that can be done through ordinary laws instead of Constitutional amendments.

"Protecting" the less populous states from what?
- 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.

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.

Agreed, although ranked choice with some form or proportional allocation instead of "single winner take all" might be even better.
- 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.

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.

https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/

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.
Or even the D'Hondt method

Merging the two houses won't help. We need proportional representation. Make the senate 600 seats, and a national, proportional election (seats are given based on % of votes for the party). They're still 6 year terms, with elections every two years. Seats are given to any party that can clear 0.5% to start, then the threshold is increased to 2% after 12 years. Then expand the house. Now you have local reps and proportional reps. Much better than giving "states" reps, which makes almost no sense.

We need proportional representation.

That's what the House is for.
- 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.

Most of this could be done with removing lobbying and just call it what it is: bribes. I bet you, once that (which would be extremely hard to pass congress) passes america would be a lot better

Exactly. NOTHING can be done without abolishing lobbyist bribery first. Also, reps must answer constituents first. Corporations last.
We still need lobbying for its original purpose of getting information from experts on topics that government official don't know much about. How do we reconcile that?
- 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.

Proposing IRV is nice and all, and definitely an improvement (whatever you do don't listen to nutters proposing range voting…it's trivially gameable…and personally I just don't think Approval's lack of ability to give a nuanced vote is very good).

But the real change happens when you move away from single-winner seat entirely. Use something like MMP or STV where the votes can be distributed proportionally.

Australia is a really good example, because we have a bit of both. Look at our House of Representatives. It uses IRV like you propose America switch to. Labor got 33% of the vote and 51% of seats. LNP got 35% of votes and 38% of votes. Greens got 12% of the vote and less than 3% of seats. Yikes. One Nation got almost 5% of votes and 0 seats.

Then look at our Senate. It uses STV so that in a normal election, each state elects 6 Senators and territories elect 1. Labor got 30% of votes and 20% of seats. LNP got 33% and 20%. Greens got 13% and 6%. One Nation, United Australia Party, independent David Pocock, and the Lambie Network each got 1 seat (1.3% of seats) on 4.3%, 3.5%, 0.4%, and 0.2% of votes, respectively. These numbers are obviously not perfect, but they're a hell of a lot better than the Reps' results. STV is a sort of quasi-proportional system, retaining local representation. In our case "local" means "at the state level", but you could also do it by taking 5–12 House of Reps districts and merging them into 1 district, returning 5–12 Representatives.

True proportional systems like MMP (look at NZ and Germany for examples of that in action) or direct proportional systems without a local member (like the Netherlands) get even closer to perfectly matching voters' will.

I broadly agree; if you're in the mood to give more detail about your problems with Approval Voting I'd value that input. It's a topic I have been casually glued to for years, without getting deeper on the analytic side.
- 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.

Oohh this is fun!

Another one: jail employees of companies if they signed off on criminal activities. If I commit 1000 dollar fraud o go to jail, obviously. If a company commits a billion dollar fraud, they get a fraction of revenue fine, really? Jail the fuckers who made those decisions. If you signed off on that decision, then too fucking bad, you go to jail. If a company forces you to commit a crime then quit and report the crime.

the only danger of that is it requires a populace to be aware of ALL crimes, which usually isnt realistic.

oops you didn't put a litium ion battery warning on a box and it shipped on a plane? go to jail.
- 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.

Your list implies the US does VAT. It's one of the only places that doesn't.

Instead we have sales tax, and that is actually assessed by the states individually. The Federal government's income is primarily from income tax and various business taxes.
- Sales tax has quite a different origin and reasoning behind it than VAT, though.
Not having VAT is stupid.

Only having it on luxury goods is a ballache.

What's a luxury good? A neckless? What about a cheap wedding ring? Okay fine all jewelry to make instead simple.

Cars? Just take the bus. Driving is a luxury and will make way more in revenue than jewelry, but that won't be passed.

Running shoes aren't a luxury. But what high end fashionable "running shoes"? What about a high end push bike used to get to work, what about the same bike used for fun.

Fuck man you would end up dealing will so much crap trying to work it out it would cost you more than it makes. Just tax rich people more for being rich and let them spend it how they like.

Missing a lot things. Gerrymandering can still occur without the electoral college, tax things seems neat in theory but need to deal with corporate taxes, term limits on the supreme court would make things worse (research indicates an age out system would be better), Police system will still be fundamentally broken, companies will still continue to maximize profit to everyone but the shareholder deficit, stock buybacks are creating major issues and allow companies to game Wallstreet, are just a few things that I think are missing here that need to be addressed.

As a US senator, that list looks like COMMUNISM to me.

As a person with a functional understanding of government and economics, this looks like ethical social capitalism to me. Privately owned production funds government-allocated programs dispersing resources more evenly over the population while still allowing a high upper limit to wealth.
- 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.
If your constituency could read they'll be very upset

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.

Too slow, I want it all now!
This is literally the rule currently
but corporations are people in America, so this would never fly without abolishing that first.
- Oh yeah I definitely mean kill that.

As a mathematician, I want to see this modified slightly (I will pair the original with my modification)

Income up to $50k is untaxed
Income up to $100k is untaxed (I have done the math, this would actually work with one of my other modifications)
VAT tax for luxury items
VAT for B2B sales based on the Value Added by their step in the production chain
Remove sales tax
Remove tax brackets - replace with a continuous function that has parameters to encapsulate the current credits and deductions, as well as new ones to encourage reasonable behaviors (green energy, having kids, not having kids, etc.)
Addendum to the above: business taxes fall get the same treatment, with parameters for things like the wealth/income gap ratio between the highest-paid employee and the median for the company, % of employees who reside in the United States, number of subsidiaries, number of technology acquisitions made. Oh, and companies that make more than $1M/yr never get a refund, period.
Require communities to cap rent, it is done by popular vote as a ballot measure, and the options are calculated based on local needs, cost of living, and median income for the town.

I have more, but I also have a headache.

Great list overall but I'm wondering what you mean by reasonable behaviors in regards to having kids or not? I understand the notion of encouraging and discouraging behaviors by legislation, but that can be difficult to negotiate/implement.
- 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.

Add winner takes all elections to this list. It always leads to a shitty two party system, exhibit a being the USA. Instead, have elections with 30 parties, each having a little bit of power, that have to work together. It gives people a chance to actually vote for the person they want, it stops the extreme swinging to left and right each time an election is won by the other side.

Add 100% income tax for those with a net worth over a certain amount, say 1 billion or so. If at some point you have souch money that you can impossibly spend it in your life time, you don't need to have it. Need investors? Make non profit investment funds, financed by the government taxes.

Add 100% gains tax for companies that have grown beyond a certain amount of employees. No extremely large company with 80.000 workers is a nice place to work at, they guaranteed fuck over the employees and customers because that's what they do. Simply cap companies on how big they can be.

Extending the previous one: prohibit companies from buying other companies. It always ends up stifling the competition, it pushes companies that wholly exist for being bought, nothing else, it's not healthy.

You forgot abolishing slavery.

Forced retirement of politicians at whatever the national retirement age currently is

Now that is a quick way to make the retirement age 120...

I haven't really seen it mentioned here yet but policy makers and judge rulings should either have additional schooling in the area they are making the policy/ruling on OR have a mandatory specialist/professional input throughout the process. So many of these brain dead policies come from not even know what TF they are talking about.

I want proper understanding from these people before they agree or pass something because "it sounds good" from lobbying

OR have a mandatory specialist/professional input throughout the process

People on the internet don't like to hear this, but that's called Lobbying.
- While this is true, I probably should have added additional context as it may be lobbying but differ in the way lobbying is currently done.
  
  It would preferably be someone currently working in acedemia as well as holding an office (state or federally) subject to a code of ethics etc. With prerequisites within the field of question.
  
  Now each judge or policy maker having their own expertise would be ideal, it's not really practical/feasible at this time. It's not necessarily lobbying in it's entirety that's an issue more so how it's done currently.
  
  One could argue any person with any statement to a judge or policy maker (I'm context) classifies as lobbying since they are trying to sway the decision in their way. So by definition there's not really a way around "lobbying" but we can mitigate the (effectively) statement bribes we have screwing our system

Also tax the rich.

The last 2 items on the list help with that.
- 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.
- 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.
- Chuck it in again for good measure. You can never tax the rich enough.

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)

If you address gerrymandering, the Senate/House divide is less important (but still important).

Keep the Senate. Make filibusters back into what they were intended as, unlimited debate. You have to have someone in the chamber talking the entire time. The filibuster was intended to allow everyone to talk. It was not intended to hold up bills forever.

"Abolish corporate personhood" doesn't go far enough. Abolish corporations. Companies over a certain size should be forced to convert to either a worker-owned co-op or a non-profit organization. Human society needs to evolve past being centered around maximizing shareholder profits.

All excellent ideas.

Now how do we afford to bribe all of the politicians to make this happen?

There should be something in there about universal free education

Abolish capitol punishments
Codify body autonomy

Not sure what is called, but ban and back tax/punish people/companies who use those foreign PO boxes and claim that that company owns the IP everything that they use, so they actually made no profit, all to avoid paying taxes. And then because "made no money" they get cash from the governments.

Term limits on SCOTUS should be 18 years, with one Justice retiring every other year.

Unless the court expands, then the term limits could be shorter

Yeah, 10 years is too short. 18 sounds pretty good. I'd also want to give them a full retirement. Ostensibly, they'd be less likely to sell influence.

You forgot land value tax. Otherwise it's looking good.

Why do you post an image of text?

Stonks.
Op, next time please post text of an image that has just text in it.
I don't know the answer in this specific case, my best guess is visibility, although you might read text posts I would take a guess and say the majority of users of sites such as Lemmy and Reddit only look at the images before interacting with a post. So an image of text would garner more interaction than the same content in a text post.

Wealth tax. You forgot that one. Otherwise every billionaire will suddenly make $49,999 in salary.

Wealth tax is a terrible idea. People think it will solve the problem with billionaires taking out loans collateralized with their stock and not paying income tax, but the solution for that is far simpler - just treat loans as income. You can even add an exception for an owner occupied mortgage if you want to keep encouraging forced savings into property. We have existing solutions that don't have the massive disincentives a wealth tax would create.

A wealth tax actually discourages investment through stocks, which is what keeps the economy moving (and before anyone says publicly traded companies thinking about short term profits is destructive, that's a separate, but serious, issue). Worse, it discourages savings of any kind. The problem with saying "oh we'll just start it only a billion dollars" or whatever is that allows for later expansion of the tax to 100 millionaires, 20 million, and boom suddenly you're taxing people with 5 million dollars which is what you'd expect a middle class elderly couple from a high cost of living area to have squirreled away for retirement. And if you don't think that would happen, you should look at the history of the income tax - because that's exactly what happened.

Also, a wealth tax is really hard to enforce, and would require a huge increase to the administrative state that itself would create a need for more taxes. That's not inherently a problem (obviously we have legions of IRS agents, etc) but we already have that infrastructure set up for income taxes and are just underutilizing it. Take how many lawsuits and hearings we already have JUST with tax assessors for property, and then try adding that to cars, boats, art, luxury clothes, appliances, privately held companies, anywhere you can hide money or that has a questionable value. It's a boondoggle we don't need to mess with when all we have to do is just reclassify collateralized debt as income because it is functionally the same as selling something.

I like taxes. I even like my high taxes because I know they pay for good services since I live in a blue state. But a wealth tax is a bad idea when we already have income taxes and can add VAT taxes for luxury goods.
- Ok, not a bad idea to tax loans...but now you're taxing people buying a home, car, financing a repair on something, etc. The point is to tax people with massive wealth, not to target someone like me who had to take out some financing to pay for a home heating boiler replacement. You could use a "well, except..." argument, but then I could counter with the same slippery slope argument you use later in your reply.
  
  A wealth tax actually discourages investment through stocks
  
  Why? Stocks are still the biggest way to increase wealth without lifting a finger to do any actual work. Maybe you get taxes more, but you're still making more money. You mean to say they're so greedy that not making billions fast enough would cause them a fit of pique? What else would the uber-wealthy invest in? Why not grow a business instead? They could also simply find a workaround to not take loans based on assets, boom, suddenly not collateralized. Enjoy your personal loan.
  
  I disagree with the baseless slippery slope argument because you stated income tax while arguing retirement accounts. They are not the same thing, and that's why we're having this discussion.

Don't forget to abolish slavery.. wait forgot they call it prison now.

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.

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?)
- Looking at it this is definitely the case, its no better than fptp because you're incentivized to give 5 stars to all candidates you can tolerate, and none to others.

Fully funded public news media with a legal firewall between government interests and that media. Controlled by journalists and representative members of the public. We desperately need to get working interests back into news media, nearly every flavor of our media is currently owned by corporate interests.

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!!!)
Most countries don't require the nonsense you go through at all.
- The nonsense is there specifically to benefit the tax prep companies. Getting rid of one without the other isn't... Anything anyone is advocating for. You get rid of both, simultaneously, because you have to, and because it's right. How you make it work? Tax the rich, mostly
Banning tax prep companies is a bad, poorly thought out idea.

Simplifying tax prep is the avert. Doing what the rest of the developed world does, where the IRS sends you a receipt and you can either accept that or manually file if you think you owe less.

Banning tax prep companies just hurts people who have a nonstandard tax situation. Small business owners, people with tax relief from disabilities, all manner of normal people in niche situations. Don't take away the tools they need, remove the opportunity for parasite companies to prey upon average people.
Change the tax law saying that under 1 million moneys individuals can't be held responsible for IRSs errors.

Also even complex income tax preparation should not take you more than an hour to fully review yourself. If it does, it's a bad system & probably like that by design.

I'd vote for you

Probably get rid of the supreme Court altogether and have cases that it currently hears be heard by a random selection of federal judges.

Probably also need to get some people smarter and more specialized than me to figure out how to capture the wealth of the wealthy. Like the whole "take out a loan against your assets, use that as money, pay no taxes" thing needs to go.

While we're having fantasies, can we expand the 14th amendment "no insurrection " bit to be more clear?

And if we're feeling spiteful, add a "no one who has held office as a member of the Republican party shall be eligible for any role in government, nor any role that engages with the government such as contractor, advisor, lobbyist." Just gut the whole party.

One more.

Now that corporations aren't people, only people can own residential land.

Can we also ban stock buybacks and limit CEO pay?

Whats a luxury item for purposes of VAT? You’ll be hung up forever on that.

For example cars:

some consider all cars a luxury we need to step away from
some see the reality that cars are required for most of us
where do you draw the line between a “necessary” car and a “luxury” car?
for the love of god, no special treatment for light trucks

VAT is just a shitty tax mechanisim, ends up being regressive (people with less money pay a larger portion of income), and really shouldnt be used. Land value tax + carbon tax is much better, and has nice side benefits like encouraging housing development and walkability.

Ban political donations, all political parties get the same, small campaign budget and allotment of advertising space/airtime funded by the government instead

The BIG unintended consequence here is that this makes starting a new party just to leech off the government a big target. Who cares if you never get anyone elected, so long as you can have government paid salaries and airtime.
- Yeah I guess there would have to be some kind of bracket system like... the more people who are registered supporters of your party the higher level of campaign funding you unlock? And it starts at zero

No tax reform? It’s a great start to make taxes easier for most individuals but we shouldn’t be allowing wealthier people to pay less percentage of taxes. There’s a bewildering array of complexity that doesn’t matter to most individuals but only serves to lower the tax rate if people who can afford to take advantage of it

That and I think the "no taxes for 50k and under" would be devastating to the budget, if the median income for a family is around 60k then that's a fuckton of tax income that is lost.

Depends on what time-scale. Sweeping changes all in one go would be asking a lot, and none of these are minor changes on their own, either.

RCV first. After that, everything gets easier.
I mean, thats the same as with fossil fuels or taxing the rich - we are programmed to overreact to any economical instability even if none if it would affect 90% of pupation and turbulence lasting a couple of years would fade quickly from memory and get the results sooner. It's basically like any revolution. It's bad in the very short term, but not as bad as not changing much for decades.

Also historically, it's the 'sweeping changes' that get all the glory and results (and actual change in power).

I agree with most of these. Key differences that'd I prefer:

Approval instead of ranked choice voting (easier auditing, simpler to explain)
Get rid of pretty much all taxes, and replaced it with a land and carbon/pollution tax
Mandate all companies be employee owned
Abolish the stock market
Ban on corporations from owning single family unit homes, every citizen capped to 3 residences, and all multi-unit homes must be non-market housing
Massive public investment into housing construction

Something something.. gerrymandering

Lots of good stuff here, and I agree with others to keep the senate. Abolish the filibuster!

Roleplaying as Decronym bot for a moment:

Acronyms, initialisms, and other phrases seen in this thread:

Shortform	Likely Meaning
VAT	Value-Added Tax
IRS	Internal Revenue Service
UBI	Universal Basic Income
CPI	Consumer Price Index
GDP	Gross Domestic Product
FPTP/FPP voting	First-Past-The-Post, or First-Past-Post voting
STAR voting	Score Then Automatic Runoff voting
RCV	Ranked Choice Voting
IRV	Instant-Runoff Voting
STV	Single-Transferable Vote
AV	Approval Voting
321/3-2-1 voting	3 Semifinalists, 2 finalists, 1 winner via rating candidates
MMP	Mixed-Member Proportional (Representation)
PAC	Political Action Committee
CCC	Civilian Conservation Corp
EC	Electoral College
NATO	North Atlantic Treaty Organization
EU	European Union
US	United States
SCOTUS	Supreme Court of the United States
RMV	Registry of Motor Vehicles
IIRC	If I Remember Correctly
TF	The Fuck
UBU	Universal Basic UwU

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.

I like almost all of this, but I disagree with merging the Senate and House as well as a VAT on luxury items. We already have tax on basically every transaction and the burden is on the consumer, that needs to change. What should happen is that all taxes on food items currently should be removed. I believe the separation of Senate and House, while burdensome and inefficient at times, really does an essential good for American society. We would fare much better if we had term limits and more than two (essentially one) political party.

Edit: I want to continue with strickening the UBI from this list as well in exchange for significanly improving social services to make sure that everyone is guaranteed food, housing, medical, and security. I get that income is important and some people cant work, but inflation is real and that money has to come from somewhere not just the ether. It would be better to create/improve upon existing social safety nets to make sure everyone can contribute to society in some way rather than just giving everyone money for nothing.

I'm wondering who defines "luxury items". I'd currently put a trip to the dentist and a car with under 120k miles in the luxury category.
- The car yes, dentist, no. Dentists are essential services imo

Where I'm from judges have to be picked by a list prepared by the bar of that jurisdiction, IIRC. That way you can't just get any barely competent idiot who happens to be a good party man as a justice on the highest court of the land.

This is a great idea! Maybe im wrong but it seems like this wasn’t a problem historically. Even partisan judges were competent. It’s only in recent years that they dropped that pretense, so maybe it was one of those things where we just assumed you’d want someone who knew what they were doing.

One of the things that Trump was great at is clearly identifying places where we just assume anyone in that position would do the right thing, out of some duty to actually running the country. Fine, let’s drown them in paperwork

Term limits on Supreme Court and Senators/Reps.

Elected officials already have term limits, they're elections. I think that if a representative keeps getting put back up there by their constituents, less turnover might be more efficient, bringing along experience.

My opinion on this did a 180 the year Trump was elected. I suddenly value experience.
- Yah, it's more that idiots will vote for the name they've seen before that's the color they like.
- So no change then?

Out of these, unfortunately the only one that even has a chance of being realized is "IRS does taxes for everyone", and even that is more like "IRS provides official avenue to not have to pay a tax prep service"

The rest of these won't happen without a revolution, because the people with the power to make these things happen all directly benefit from them.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see even one or two things on this list become reality. Any two would make a ton of difference for a lot of people. But capitalism doesn't like it when you benefit the average Joe, and capitalism always wins here.

Any time a budget is not passed on time, House, Senate and Presidential/VP salaries are cut to minimum wage until a new budget takes effect.

(I say "cut to minimum wage" because unfortunately the Constitution has been interpreted as dictating that their pay never be interrupted. It does not, however, specify how much they have to be paid.)

I think I'll add "abolish the filibuster" on v3. Senators make more money from their owners/donors than their salary anyway.

Way way way better than the first one!

The 50k and under untaxed I disagree with. It sets up for a possible scenario where those who are taxed get priority in policy. If you are able to be a productive member of society, you should pay taxes to support that society, and the infrastructure it provides.

Most of the others in the list I agree with or don't know enough about the case to comment

Well tell me then why are we being taxed without being represented
What an awful world it would be if we let the rich people have priority in policy!

And another one: push cities (by carrot and sticks, financial incentives and penalties) to change their layouts and designs to be humans first, 15 minute cities, whatever you want to call them. Pedestrian areas and cycling infrastructure over cars, mixed use building areas, let's get rid of the suburb rot. It makes it that people don't need a car and if you don't need a car, why have an expensive piece of crap that costs a fortune to use and maintain? Cars will still be allowed, because of course. It's just that priorities have to change. People first, cyclists first. Cities will become more quiet, people will walk and cycle more, they'll be outside more, healthier, happier, safer, richer, safer.

Not just bikes on YouTube :) he's heavy on good public transport and well... Bikes.
- I'm a Dutch guy living in Canada, the opposite of him, but I'm all aboard with him, love the channel, he's awesome

Soapbox: You there! Are you tired of getting sand kicked in your face? I ask you: why does the US have public debt without public equity?

Public funding, subsidy, stimulus, and infrastructural spending should purchase public equity that can only be bought back from the public via surplus taxes. We don’t have to call it socialism. It can be capitalism proper. But it’s the people’s capital and labor being lent, interest-free. They should expect a return. Fair is fair.

It’s simpler and stronger than labor unions. There’s no collective bargaining for temporary compensation, no dues, no pickets, no fuss. The pension is paid from the start by public endowment as a matter of course, eliminating the underlying financial insecurity employers exploit. The free market is more free when poverty can’t dictate your fee.

And besides securing the future for so many people, it would change the way citizens see themselves and the world around them, the stake they have in their governance and economy, and would certainly reframe public discourse.

National healthcare is clearly overdue vertical integration that would curtail inefficiencies and improve outcomes.
Entitlements like UBI could then be ordinary financial vehicles, annuities of the ever-expanding public trust.
National debt would become leverage for a better future rather than a burdensome inheritance.
Conservative rhetoric would sound hopelessly plebeian against an owner-proletariat. Whining about unfair government handouts has no place where everyone is granted the same share of public dividends.
Many large private interests that have historically gobbled up public funds would quickly see the public become majority shareholders, effectively nationalizing many industries that should have been long ago. In particular, many nonprofits would coalesce into the bonafide public works they should have been all along.
It even allows the good intent of inheritance without compounding generational inequality, and your safety net is not contingent upon means testing or number of years working. Were you just born? Welcome. You’re covered.

Public equity unlocks the logical, humane, and sustainable version of capitalism in which every worker is vested and shares both the means of production and the value they produce.

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

On your last question, while changing reps to at-large would certainly help with gerrymandering, that would make it more difficult for reps to have solid relationships with their constituents. It benefits both the constituents who don't have to travel as far(although phone calls and emails would still theoretically work) to connect with their rep, but also allows the rep to tour their area more frequently and be able to handle specific, local issues more effectively. There are tradeoffs with everything though, so it might work better overall. It's just so hard to change the status quo, which goes for most things that people have listed here.
- Yes, the downsides of at-large reps would surely be that if no one rep is responsible for particular local issue(s), it's possible that none would take it up and that would leave some constituencies unrepresented. My thought about that is that when district maps are drawn to purposely divide particular constituencies (I mean, look at all those pack-and-crack maps that split minority groups into districts that mostly elect people that don't represent them), an at-large system might allow those constituencies to unify around particular at-large reps?
  I don't know, I'm spit-balling here. But thank you for taking up the question constructively!

No more first past the post elections and so break the duopoly

Why do you want more than 435 reps? How does that benefit anyone? They're doled out in proportion of population.

The number of reps is limited and hasn't been raised in a very long time. The ratio of constituents to reps has increased drastically over the years.
No they aren't.
- Yes they are... They're reallocated every 10 years in response to the census as numbers change.
  
  If you're talking about how Wyoming has more per person voting power than California that's more because of them having the same 2 senators as every other state.

Money =/= speech

Another one: push cities to have green (as in trees) everywhere. Not only is it prettier, people will be more happy with loads of green everywhere, but it also lowers temperatures in cities. Better mental healthy better physical health.

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.

state rep cap

What you're looking for is "the congressional apportionment amendment", and it was passed by congress with the bill of rights, and ratified by many states but every time they almost met the 3/4ths threshold a new state was admitted, and it always remained short. 11 states have ratified it. It had no expiry and as such is still waiting to be ratified by the states. It needs 27 more ratifications to become an amendment to the constitution.

Death penalty for lobbyists.

RCV is the best available way to elect the president (afaik), but for the House I'd use full-on proportional representation. You could use the German or the Irish models, both of which still retain bonds between reps and their districts.

Both can be proportional in terms of peoples (ranked) votes counting the same.

If you could achieve 1 thing on this list you could do all of them.

I see the value in an odd number of branches. That’s the only one that I don’t support. Can’t have two branches fight. We need an odd number for a tie breaker.

They don't really directly "vote" like that though

@3volver Hope you do a v3. There are some good ideas in these comments. It's been a good read.

At the bare minimum force states to proportionally allocate electors. I know this is realistically impossible.

twenty year old me “heck yeah”

Forty year old me “never going to happen.”

ALL sales tax needs to be replaced with value-added tax. Zero tax on used goods, including cars, if you actually want to reduce waste and related harm to the environment.

Pipe dreams

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

Might not be need anymore with a handful of the items listed but campaign finance reform to show where all of a campaigns money came from and went. Also thought there was a better term but can't fully remember.

I'd suggest adding:

Establish new "Common Ground" party with a platform mandated to only reflect issues and positions with a 2/3rd majority support among the American public in multiple 3rd party polls from different pollsters

Political ideology falls along a normal distribution. Very dumb to draw the line down the middle rather than capturing the norm and excluding the edges.

Let's have progress demand a shift in the national attitudes over time rather than let minor shifts of a few percentage points every few years in a deadlock determine progress or regress.

Land back

I agree with a lot of this, especially ranked choice voting. Don't agree with abolishing the electoral college though. Rural voters and urban voters are generally quite different, if you get rid of the electoral college the rural voters will be completely ignored by every politician simply because there are fewer of them and they are spread out more. I don't think that means their priorities should be invalidated.

That said, I would add one thing. Abolish primary votes. Political parties can nominate as many or as few people as they wish, anybody with enough signatures can get their name on the final ballot. The current primary system basically disenfranchises voters in any state that isn't in the first 10 or 15 primary elections. Half the candidates will have dropped out by the time their state votes.

On the electoral college: dirt doesn't vote and shouldn't set policy. These cities where everyone lives are the places that should set policy. They are the places where the most people have to live with the policies that are set. I'm not saying ignore the rural areas in the rural people, I'm just saying that they are second class and should be treated as second class, for good reason.
- I'm not saying ignore the rural areas in the rural people
  
  But you are. That's exactly what will happen. Urban voters will enact policies that work well in cities but are disastrous in rural areas. And they won't give a crap about the rural people who end up suffering and have little or no representation in government.
  
  I'm just saying that they are second class and should be treated as second class, for good reason.
  
  Perhaps we should codify that into law. Say, only give rural voters 3/5 of a vote? Jokes aside, I think this attitude is downright un-American. I don't think you should be first or second class based on where you live or what color your skin is. I have political views that I think are correct, but so do you and so does everybody else and the whole point of our system is we all get a seat at the table. The Framers of our Constitution made the system the way it is so that rural voters wouldn't lose their seat at the table. And I have seen nothing to believe that any modern politician is even a little bit smarter than them.
- Do you like to eat? Because the people hanging out with that dirt are the people producing your food. Have some respect. Your cities are far more fragile and dependent than you like to pretend.

What would it take to actually get ranked choice voting? That would need a constitutional amendment right?

no, the state of Maine already does ranked choice voting, it's actually really nice. It's up to the state level to implement it though, as it's up to the states to decide the process for the system

Term limit for congress

Introduce a corporate death penalty for grave offences: a business is declared bankrupt and sent in to liquidation even if it is financially sound.

If we just had term limits things would already be better!

President decided by sortition (like jury selection) with a less military-focused role, cabinet members decided by voting on a list of working professionals in the applicable field (aka someone who works in agricultural sciences to be secretary of agriculture), housing as a human right, functional petitions that can initiate a direct vote in a special election on any issue with enough signatures. Ban prison labor and for profit prisons. Ban private schools and invest heavily in public schools. Employees of public services like libraries, schools, gov jobs pay no taxes. De-militarize the police. Sever the relationship between police and current/former prosecutors (possibly by only getting out-of-county prosecutors to oversee cases involving police?), enshrine prisoner voting rights, enshrine Land back policy, no corporate ownership of single family homes. Rent for an apartment has to be split to be exactly what the mortgage currently costs for the owner of the building + overhead, repairs and community agreed upon updates (if the building has no mortgage anymore, it is lowered to be only what is needed for overhead etc.- being a landlord shouldn't be profitable, it should be a service), salary has to be clearly marked on every job posting and if it is found out that they are underpaying what they advertise, the labor board can fine the company by percentage of total profit increasing 2x every time it happens. All jobs are union eligible except for police. State tax benefits to influence city centers to become car-free. Loitering is a protected activity. Ban EULAs that can change at the will of the company. Force companies to pay out money to those they stole data from and sold. Ban the NSA, TSA, FBI, and CIA. Ban the stock market in some way that wouldn't be awful. Ban more performant car/truck tires that's causing our microplastics problem in favor of almost entirely naturally decomposing tire compounds. All vehicles and machinery are subject to the emissions standards of cars. Farmers are always allowed to set up a stand and sell products from their farm in parking lots (even parking lots of grocery stores). No unmarked police cars and no police sirens at night. No 24 hour news cycle. Crackdown on javascript's power on the internet. Break up apple, google, Microsoft, and any other behemoth I'm forgetting. Ban court fees. Ban non-competes. 3-4 day workweek. On top of location representation in our federal government, include wage representation and age representation as well. Surprise, all businesses are co-ops now! There's probably way more, but I can only fantasize so much lol

You've got huge, earthshaking, constitutional-level changes here lumped together with minor stuff like tax-prep and tax brackets. There's no sense of scale here. (Also, forget tax increases, implement a wealth tax)

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.

Individual rights get eroded if people don’t keep the good fight. The hope for a system that can prevent the amassing of power in the hands of a few through no effort by the many is entitled childishness personified.
- If you prevent the swelling of power Capitalists regularly achieve, then people can maintain that good fight.
- Begging the capitalist class to give you more crumbs is not the good fight.
  
  The good fight involves distributing the source of their power, control over the means of production, to the people.

In other words: delete the GOP

100% yes!

From an outsider perspective. Two houses/chambers are better than one. But the second should be a review chamber that sends amendments back to the first. If those amendments are rejected by the first then so be it.

Something like PAYE would be better than having your government work out the tax. It places the expanse on the companies rather than the government or the individual.

With a less convoluted tax system and businesses working it out you probably wouldn't need to ban those tax companies as market forces would make them no longer viable.

VAT should be on luxury goods, and ones that the government wants to discourage the use of for public health (500% vat on tobacco products, 300% VAT on vaping etc).

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

Lul.

But still - abolish sales tax and get on the VAT train to join the modern economies.
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"

You want a really ambitious one that would help, abolish the states.

Abolish corporate personhood? No. Someone obviously doesn't understand what corporate personhood is or how it exists.

If there is no such thing as corporate personhood, how do you tax a corporation? How does a corporation own any property? How does a hospital exist? How do groups of people pool capital? How does one sue groups of people who have pulled their Capital and caused harm?

The jurisdiction of all law is based on personal jurisdiction. Corporate personhood is considered a "legal fiction," it doesn't exist to protect corporations, although it sometimes does, it exists by necessity and by operation of law. It would exist even if you didn't want it to, it would just have to be called something else. The alternative is that groups of people cannot pool resources toward a common endeavor, or, they can, but it's a lawless and ungovernable enterprise, with nobody having any enforceable rights.

....

House and Senate merge? No. Read up on bicameral versus unicameral legislative power as limitations on power, and in America the Senate's role as a saucer. It makes sense especially when the Congress is a huge body to begin with and when dealing with classified information and covert matters of state; in which case a higher tier with a smaller group and longer terms makes sense to protect our secrets.

This is the also the only idea, along with Supreme Court term limits, that requires a Constitutional Amendment. The others are much more feasible and reasonable. ...

IRS shouldn’t be filing taxes for anyone, that just seems egregious given that there so many ways to justify lowering one’s tax burden. I am not sure if a third party bureaucracy would be incentivized to do that for tax filers.

If you have extra deductions you can regise it. Otherwise, they come up with a tax return they’re satisfied with.

You missed step one, which is to not live in the United States. Alternatively live in a parallel universe where any of this would be politically achievable.

Ranked choice voting is great, yes please.
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.
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.
Again, why? The house reps are by population of the state/district. We don't need MORE bureaucrats.
Yes, please. US "healthcare" is in shambles. It's a complete disaster and the only people that benefit are Insurance companies.
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.
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.
, 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.
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.
sure, on board.
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.

My state hired a bunch of rich people to run a hedge fund. They're making us a ton of money.

Could you imagine if your state owned like 10%, Facebook, Google or something?
- States shouldn't be gambling with tax money, IMO.

I mean, I could add to it...

Pay reparations to victims of Jim Crow/Segregation and descendants of those bound by the practice of Chattle Slavery.
Nationalize the telecom corporations. Use the profits to fund a Bell Laboratories type research institute as well as public college departments in the relevant fields.
Nationalize the freight railroads. Use the profits to fund a high quality bus system in rural areas, an "Interstate-style" 110-125 mph regional/commuter passenger rail system nationwide, and develop 155-200+ mph HSR corridors between appropriate city pairs.
Initiate planning for metro/light rail systems in every city with a population of 250k or higher.
End the Embargo on Cuba and fully normalize relations. Shutter and remove the facilities at Guantanamo Bay; return the land to the Cuban government and pay reparation for it's theft.
End NATO while helping the EU organize it's own native unified defense force. Form a new treaty with the EU for common defense.
Forgive all debt the US holds from co-called "third world" nations.
Remove all "NeoLiberal" stipulations and restrictions the IMF has placed on so-called "third world" nations.
Pass a federal law ending so-called "Right to Work" at the state level and triple the NLRB's budget.
End the funding of public schools through local property tax and replace it with a Federal tax on corporations.
Bust up Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet into their viable constituent parts.
Formally recognize the nation of Palestine at the UN.
Join the International Criminal Court.

Great band-aids, but doesn't fix the core issue of Capitalism, and as such these changes are likely to be rolled back and exploitation, both local and global, will continue.

In addition, this says nothing of police reform, minority protections, worker democracy, abortion rights, and so forth.

Agreed, but in the short term just managing capitalism goes a long ways for people living their lives.

And giving power to the people is the only way to eventually change the system & move from capitalism (and it's main problems).

Universal vote by mail? No. I can imagine several situations where votes "go missing" or "suddenly appear" and any investigation would have a really hard time finding evidence.

This same argument over and over again. My state has had mail in ballots by default since before I was voting age and we never seem to have a problem.
How big of a problem is that, compared to the millions of people who struggle to make the time and vote?

My girlfriend works two jobs. Gets up at 8-9am, most days works til 3am. Has to take care of her grandmother with Alzheimer's, do all her shopping/banking/cleaning/etc on the weekends. She is not an isolated case. Many people don't have the time to do anything else.

Anything that increases voter turnout should be adopted. The US already has vote by mail. Expanding the program is a good thing.

Ranked choice voting systems are cool but I have a lot of doubt about it actually changing much in the way of who ends up in government. The government is filled with people who align quite neatly with the people who participate in party primaries.

It always seems like a thing that people imagine is going to result in their preferred government. Really though it is the voters you disagree with and the system mostly (if somewhat imperfectly) reflects their desires.

If you want (for instance) more left candidates to get into office, you have to start at the bottom and build a big bench of left candidates with proven track records who have a base of support. You can’t air drop a socialist into the potus race and expect voters to catch up with you. Stategic voting is a small problem, not voting is a much bigger one.

Nobody votes third party because it's pointless. That in turn means new parties have no reason to exist. Once it was actually possible to vote for a third party while still making a choice between the top 2, people would do that, and options would appear.
- Yeah, I understand how it works. I’m just don’t believe that strategic voting is really holding back candidates that I might like better. I think other voters are turning up to dem primaries in greater numbers.
  
  Like I said, I like ranked choice, let’s do it. But, be prepared to see very little change.
- I’m not even sure this is true. Certainly many people do vote third party, since they do get votes. Are there actual statistics on this or just online anecdotes?
  
  I can only give personal anecdotes:
  
  I’ve voted third party for President twice
  
  My vote for one of the major parties is also pointless, since my state leans strongly in one direction
  
  we don’t even get national campaigns, since we’re not a swing state. They also know my vote is pointless

I disagree with the tax thing.

regular people who actually have to work shouldn't pay any taxes, only people who make multiple millions of dollars per year or more should pay taxes.

I've always heard that abolishing corporate personhood would make them untaxable. I don't know for sure, but I imagine you'd have to be very careful with that one. That said, I understand the general goal, and I'm for it.

Edit: That was a lazy comment. Wikipedia:

Treating juridical persons as having legal rights allows corporations to sue and to be sued, provides a single entity for easier taxation and regulation, simplifies complex transactions that would otherwise involve, in the case of large corporations, thousands of people, and protects the individual rights of the shareholders as well as the right of association.

"I've always heard..." followed by "I don't know for sure..." are the hallmarks of a comment that should have never been written in the first place.
- See edit.
Whoever you heard that from knows even less about tax law than I do.

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.

None of this is meant to be what I think is going to happen, it's what I think should happen. I like thinking about solutions. Congress isn't actually capable of implementing this stuff because it's corrupt as shit and we're headed towards a recession.
- Yeah fair. On an utopian level I agree with virtually all things 😁
So the system doesn't work (and didn't really in the best of times), everyone else successfully moved forwards - but because the system might work in theory, you should stick with it?

Ngl, sounds like copy-pasted from propaganda brochure.

Don't give "too much money to the poor"? What even is the worst case for that when you have production levels where a) there should be no poor people to even give them money and b) even giving "too much money" to everyone right now wound only marginally effect the economy.

Like, is there a threat that they will use that money to lobby the government to increase taxes for the rich?

Or perhaps that would make for a better world and kinder society which wound be absolutely terrible? Can't live in a society without poor people? Dude.

Americans like to argue that increasing taxes lowers GDP (but actually just short-term stock prices) yet I've never met anyone that in case of eg 90% average tax on their 10 million income would just say 'fuck it, one million is not worth it, it's basically the same as living homeless on the street so I'm just gonna do that'.
- Don’t give “too much money to the poor”? What even is the worst case for that when you have production levels where a) there should be no poor people to even give them money and b) even giving “too much money” to everyone right now wound only marginally effect the economy.
  
  How do you mean? Maybe that read wrong - again, not a native speaker - but I meant that instead of just giving everyone more and more free-floating cash, once you've tackled societal poverty to an acceptable enough degree, it seems far more important to transfer extra cash stripped from billionaires etc into projects that enhance the quality of life for everyone, like public free healthcare, free public transport, free internet access, etc etc.
  
  Sure, everyone wants and frankly needs a certain amount of money they can freely spend on luxury items even beyond a basic need, but once a certain level of that is achieved, I feel there's so many society-benefitting projects that should get money first. That is to say, we should not try to repeat the same mistake that ultimate led to the shit we're in now, the whole "more money is more better" error. Enough money + not much need for money to begin with feels much more stable to me.
Conservatives are poisonous
- What do you mean? I don't disagree, but it's not easy to convince them of that, sadly.

Not a single comment here has said give up the guns. It's like everyone is fine with the uniquely American problem of mass shootings...