General Discussion

Mostly good stuff. I don't think I'd merge house and Senate. Some of them need more constraint, like I'd legalize prostitution, but only if it's regulated like restaurants (health inspectors, workers rights, etc.).

The last one could just be "free education"

I’m 90-95% on board, which is astounding considering the current options. Now fleshing out the legislation to make this transition possible…

Mandatory voting just adds semi-random votes, skewing the proportion of people who are really voting for their own interests, but rather out of vibes due to obligation. Holiday on voting days and repealing of disenfranchisement measures work much better.

All the points are nice but the plan does not "make sense" in the sense that it will probably never happen (at least within our lifetimes).

Free education.

No private/charter schools.

Religions are businesses and pay taxes.

Ban religious-justified discrimination.

Religion is private between you and God.

Absolute separation between church and state.

Repeal all religion based laws.

I dont understand why Americans are horny for mandatory voting. Voting is mandatory in Greece, it makes no difference. It is theoretically illegal to not vote but are you going to imprison people for not voting? So it isnt enforced, at all.

No one is voting because it is mandatory. Greece has 60% participation.

How tf Americans don't have a holiday on voting day 😭

Ok so..

Mandatory voting

I think this can get messy. It would require a system to prosecute those who don't vote. That kind of registry can be very easily used for nefarious purposes by politicians or just anyone with access to that information. Also, it would really depend on what degree of mandatory this is. If you get thrown in jail then we are going to see a lot of poor people in prison for no reason. If you get just a fine then we are essentially introducing the inverse of a poll tax. Not voting is a protected form of free speech for a reason and can be interpreted as protest.

Merge house into senate

Last time something like this was posted I got flamed for asking what the point of this one is. The Senate is a representation of the states rights we have in our constitution. It serves as a safeguard against heavily populated areas dictating the laws for much less populated states. I'm all for reform but eliminating the Senate all together seems like a step backwards.

Ban tipping

I think this is another one where the spirit of the idea is right but the execution is wrong. What we need to ban is allowing restaurants to pay tipped positions far below minimum wage, and stop allowing restaurants to take a cut of the tip at all.

The act of tipping itself is a cultural thing that needs to be addressed culturally. If you can't tip someone for something, complications in the law arise that may disallow giving money to people in general. For example how do you distinguish between tipping a server for a meal and giving the server a dollar as a gift?

#1. Truly abolish slavery. #2. Change the legal system from punishment to rehabilitation. #3. Congress gets minimum wage. #4. Minimum wage and unemployment must be a livable wage.

• internet listed as an essential utility like water, power, and phone services

IMPROVE PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION

edit: DST for areas that need it like alaska or new york but not California and others

Yeah except increase taxes on highest income bracket by 65, not 5%.

Remove lobbying.

I don’t like a 15 year term for scotus.

A term limit does make sense, but either in the form of a forced retirement age or a 36 year term. They should also be barred from collecting a wage or benefits from any employer after the end of their term (they should get a damn good retirement package, too).

There are good reasons for SCOTUS to be a life appointment. You don’t want them being bought out with lucrative cushy job offers once they leave. 36 years ensures one appointee per presidential term.

Reverse Harlow V Fitzgerald, that illegally set up Qualified Immunity.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/us/politics/qualified-immunity-supreme-court.html

What about making the highest tax bracket immutable.

Basically, anyone earning more than that amount, for every dollar of earnings above that amount, taxes cannot be exempted, refunded or otherwise redirected.

Say that tax bracket is 500k/yr, and some rich fuck earns 2M. They must pay the tax, whatever percent of tax that is, on the final 1.5M of earnings. So if it's 50% taxes, they must pay $750k, plus whatever taxation is applicable to the first $500k. They can't skirt it by putting that money into a tax shelter or by donating it to the corrupt charity that they run.

You forgot "embrace the metric system".

Not sure if your list is ordered or not, but I would order it in a way where the top N can be implemented sensibly.

For instance, banning tax preparation companies is a bad idea if you haven't first made the IRS file your taxes for you, but your list had the former above the latter.

Likewise, the voting stuff only makes sense if implemented backwards from how you have it:

• national holiday first
• mail in for all second
• mandatory third (this is getting a bit...overreachy?)

Merg Senate in house: no: checks and balances.

I'm still on team Approval Voting and Proportional Approval Voting.

Id also add the corporations cant own single family housing. Huge penalty for multiple houses.

• ranked choice voting - ok I think we can agree here
• Mandatory voting - how? Currently voting is handled state by state, you want to make the federal government take that over? What would the punishment be for not voting? Frankly I disagree with this
• Universal vote by mail - even more how? Again, federal takeover of voting process? How do you ensure no votes are lost especially when someone will be punished for not voting?
• Voting day national holiday - definitely agree.
• Legalize marijuana - this takes a lot more than just saying "marijuana is legal now." Are previous marijuana related convictions going to be overturned, if so how? Are marijuana sales going to be regulated? If so how?
• Legalize prostitution - similar questions as with marijuana
• Revert citizens United - certainly agree here but that's a big fuckin how? It was explicitly the supreme court overruling a law passed by Congress. Amend the Constitution to say something explicit?
• Abolish corporate home ownership - very strange stuff here because you start touching on the above, too. Maybe more you're looking to cancel corporate personhood but that comes with a huge amount of problems too
• Abolish electoral college - sure why not if you've solved the voting issues above
• Abolish gerrymandering - this is what made me make this response in the first place. You can't just say "abolish gerrymandering" without some plan for it. That's like saying "abolish borders" like it's meaningful. How? Who decides what districts look like? Will there still be districts? If not how will representation be determined?
• Abolish filibuster - I think the filibuster is fine. If everything else on this list goes through, hopefully we have meaningful ways of ousting useless obstructionist politicians instead
• Merge Senate into house - why? What does this solve?
• Remove house rep cap - FUCKING agreed. The cap is unconstitutional and absurd
• Universal healthcare - lots of hows here too but Obamacare was a good start and I'm down with single payer
• Universal basic income - how much? Does it count toward the 50k below?
• Income up to $50k untaxed - fine. I also think any monetary amount in the legislature should be increased by the CPI automatically every year. Fines, limits, payouts, etc.
• Ban tax prep - hmm ok
• IRS files taxes for citizens - how does this work? Is tax code flattened to make it so citizens have no choices to make? Do things like tax credits for buying solar panels go away?
• Vat for luxury items - who decides what's luxury?
• Supreme Court 15 year limit - disagree, the whole point of lifetime terms is to prevent getting what's yours and getting out.
• Increase highest bracket tax - sure why not
• Collateral for loan is realized gain - expand?
• Abolish PACs and lobbying
• Politicians banned from stocks - so they can't own shares of any companies? Or they just can't trade while in office? Does this go for any elected official? More than just elected officials?
• Municipalize Internet - at a minimum declare it a utility. What's the rest of the plan?
• Abortion constitutional right - I'd argue it already is one, though the supreme Court evidently isn't in agreement. An explicit "bodily autonomy" amendment would be nice. Add a right to privacy to that too, expanding on the 4th.
• Ban tipping - idk if I agree with trying to codify what should be a cultural change, but I'm generally on board with the Idea. There's a million loopholes to close in any language to this effect
• free financial education - just like... Government funded seminars? Mandated high school courses? What do you take out to fit this in?

Instead of banning tipping, the law should maybe require to include all costs. This should not just apply to stuff served, but anything.

A commendable attempt at building the foundations of a progressive movement that breaks the current political stagnation we have endured for the past forty years or more.

Unfortunately the majority of people are inexplicably content to be shafted by successive governments whatever their political persuasion.

Ranked choice is quite terrible actually, barely better than Plurality (also known as FPTP). The center for election science has a whole article on it here. https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/

3-2-1 voting and STAR are the best choices, but the CES actually advocates for approval due to logistics and people getting confused by 321 and star.

mandatory voting

what the fuck lmao? where did this come from, genuinely asking this is so authoritarian and out of place among the rest of the stuff

End qualified immunity for law enforcement!

• Democratize the workplace.

There are probably many ways you could go about this: Requiring that employees have a representative on the board of all corporations, forcing companies to give a certain amount of equity to employees, all businesses have to be worker co-ops, maybe some kind of automatic unionization? The point is to give workers more say in how businesses are run and a fairer cut of the value they produce, which would probably end up fixing some of the other things on this list as a byproduct.

• News reporting must be factual and clearly distinguishable from opinion and other non-news programming.

Something needs to be done about deliberate propaganda and misinformation. I'm not sure what the answer is here, but maybe having some rules for what can be called "news" would be a start.

• Enumerated right to bodily autonomy

This would cover abortion, prostitution, and marijuana consumption, and would also cover many forms of trans healthcare that are currently under attack. Speaking of which...

• Strengthened protections for minorities, including legal recognition of trans and intersex people. Something like the Equal Rights Amendment but for all minorities. Let's explicitly get it into law that you can't discriminate based on something people are born with.

I don't agree with merging the House and Senate; uncapping the House fixes the proportionality issue and the Senate is a useful check to ensure that smaller states still have a voice.

Adding 5% to the highest tax bracket seems way too low. There should be a new top bracket with a rate so high it's almost confiscatory; anyone earning that much is a resource hoarder and should be made to share with the rest of society. We used to have a top tax rate of 95%, so this isn't unrealistic.

Banning tax prep is redundant if the IRS is calculating it for you, and I wouldn't want to outright ban it for those whose financial situations may be complicated enough to actually need it.

Why are we including a ban on tipping? I feel like we're getting lost in the details here. This should be a shorter list of high-level changes. If you don't like tipping, wouldn't it be better to do something about employers not giving fair wages in general?