For more discussion and your own suggestions you can post in https://lemmy.world/c/policy
Text post rather than image of text https://lemmy.world/post/13834866
No, you missed a very crucial point:
- Make it illegal to post screenshots of text posts instead of just the text.
I’d say end private student loans, not federal, and develop a program for automatic forgiveness and universal higher education.
Most people most of the time should be able to get as much education as they care to get, courtesy of the public. For everything else I could see deferred interest federal loans with a procedure for automatic forgiveness. (Went to Cambridge but then came back to the US to live and work? Should cost you as much as going to a state University, just more paperwork)
I’d also like easier immigration, and much more lax work visa standards. Right now people can get taken advantage of with the H1B program, since deportation for unemployment is a pretty strong incentive to put up with bad work conditions.
Collateral for loan is realised gain. Nice. I always wondered what a good mechanism against that kind of tax cheating would be.
How about ending step-up basis and have the taxes in gains taken from the estate before inheritance?
I used to work for the U.S. Department of Defense and can confidently approve of massive defense budget cuts and merging of several military branches. This is only a single and relatively minor anecdote, but it is a small piece of a much larger problem and is one I can share from personal experience:
I used to be the government lead for a highly successful defensive capability that only consisted of myself and 2-3 defense contractors. We outperformed several long-standing projects that had 10x the staff, 100x the budget, and had been around for approx 10 years without going operational (“operational” in this case meaning that intelligence analysts are authorized to provide actionable intelligence derived solely from the tool). My team released 3 operational releases within 1 calendar year from the start of contract.
I don’t say this to disparage the staff of the other project(s), but rather to highlight how the government can afford to cut long-standing under-performing projects and become more lean and efficient. The government funding allocation is often in the realm of $300k/yr for a single FTE. Multiply that by a team of 20-30 that works on a project that is shelfware after 8-10 years.
My same project was approached by numerous branches of the US and FVEY military community. Branch A offered tons of money to put it on a ship; branch B offered even more money to put it in the back of reconnaissance aircraft or fighter jet; branch C offered money to make it man-packable for ground troops. US taxpayers already paid for this capability once (my team and myself) and we made it as unclassified (i.e. disseminable) and modular as possible (it was literally designed to run on a general host computer running Linux), yet each branch was willing to fork over tens of millions of dollars for something they could have installed on a $2k computer using some internal software repository. And that’s what I suggested they do.
Again, this is just one minor anecdote. How often does this happen where taxpayers are forced (being that they have absolutely no control over how the defense budget is organized) to pay for the same (perhaps MUCH more expensive) tools e.g. 5-10 times because military branch A, B, C, etc, want their own flavor of the same thing? Why does the military often have pissing matches of authority when there is so much overlap between some of them? Take away their stick by taking away some of their funding, and force them to share and cooperate.
if you want to make this a real project: some of your items are clearly actionable and fairly self-contained. for example STAR voting is pretty well defined. other ones, not so much. “abolish the filibuster” and “end religious tax exemption” have inumerable possible implementations where many of the nuances will have far reaching implications.
would be interested in this project being separated out into a separate community to avoid spam and start seeing what legislation lemmy comes up with. call it lemmyslation (patent pending lol). maybe put the legal code on github? idrk how github works.
I agree with everything here. Do I need to move to a different instance?
No, this is the democratic far left wishlist, which I think is core lemmy. Good luck getting it done. Once you step over that line, you may want to find another instance.
lemmy.world is not far left by any stretch of the imagination
Not far left, democratic far left. I’m no talking about leftist, I’m just talking about the lib left.
Don’t bother with this whoreticulture account, they are just on here to pretend to be trans and then they behave like an ass to try to get people to dislike trans people or something. I know it’s stupid, but you can take a look at their account history to see what they are doing. It’s no wonder it’s a new account, I imagine they are doing this a lot. I’m working on a little script that just auto-warns people about them.
this person is mad that I called them a terf lol
I’m not mad. I haven’t called you any childish names, or did anything else that would indicate anger. That would be you and you alone, and unless you go and start editing your posts anyone can clearly see that.
I’m gonna be real, looking through your account, you seem like a bioessentialist. Potentially a terf, though one that hides it well.
Some of the things you’ve said are rooted in bioessentialism and come off as very backhanded which I’m assuming set off the other commenter’s alarm bells. Quit the act or educate yourself from a trans positive feminist angle, whichever fits your role better.
for anyone that happens to read this and feels lost, here is a good place to start with what bioessentialism is and why it’s linked to terfs.
TERF isn’t name calling, it’s a description of your beliefs. the fact that you see it as such shows me you are one, terfs are the only ppl who refer to “terf” as a slur
I don’t even think Lemmy.world is far left within the context of the Democratic party 😭
According to the upvotes (which isn’t totally accurate since I upvoted from Midwest.social, but all the true leftists and maybe the far right instances have been defederated), it’s about a 70/30% split of people who agree with these democratic far left ideas.
Where I disagree with you is your labeling of “far left”, not whether or not this list is popular here
Far left… Ahahaha.
Capitalism has really done a number on these poor Americans, the right wing have managed to push the compass so far in their favour that even a lot of the most basic items in this list are considered “far left” to them.
One prime example of the extremes of propaganda within the US has to be the mass opposition towards unions (which has thankfully began to ease in recent years.) I could never comprehend why so many people would argue against having a union to protect their own rights as workers. it was bizarre to me.
No offence to any Americans that read this. But I’ve done my fair share of arguing for you over the years, and some of the opposition I have come up against is just completely bewildering. Almost like some sort of capitalist Stockholm syndrome.
capitalist Stockholm syndrome.
That infused with the idea that anything that isn’t capitalism is socialism (which might as well be communism). It’s like we’re afraid to leave our abusive financial system.
You are, and that’s by design, as the core of your country from the education right down to the media and pop culture, all revolve around the financial system, designed to keep the wealth in the pockets of the few while everyone else argues over the same pointless and divisive issues that are pushed every single day. It happens in most countries, but the US is the best example due to how transparent it all is.
Thanks for writing this up, but you don’t have to convince me. 😋
PLEASE MORE PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION, I BEG YOU
And high speed trains
i count as same thing
all my homies hate cars
Asking again if you would make a community for this, as it would be nice to discuss each point individually and for others to add points.
Thank you!
Looks like nobody has joined the new community yet, you should probably highlight it more
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !policy@lemmy.world
Mass transit buss, train, continuous across the country (inter/intra state, city, etc…)
Pedestrian and bike infrastructure, continuous and shielded from motor vehicles, in part or supplement to all main roads, highways, etc…
End and roll back privatization of public services
Universal pre-K
After school activities funding
Safe third places for teens/young adults (malls? Pools? Idk what kids are into these days)
Free adult education (community college subsidy, Library programs, etc…)
Etc…
Prohibit the owning of residential property by all non-individuals, and require individuals to have a minimum of a 70% minimum residency requirement on the one residential property they own.
Age cap on all elected positions.
The total elimination of all for-profit war manufacturing.
A wealth cap set to some reasonable percentage above the poverty line.
Immediate trials for crimes against humanity for all existing billionaires and most C-level employees of all energy, “defense”, pharmesutical, utility, media, and mass conglomerate corporations.
PLAN:
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List everything
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Fix everything
Looks solid!
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Another text image!
Why a land tax? Many (most? all?) towns and cities have a real estate tax.
You forgot long term capital gains tax. There is no reason that the investor class should be paying a flat 15% tax. Critics will quickly jump up to say that we need to incentivise people to make long term investments in businesses, which I agree with, so short term capital gains should be taxed like gambling winnings.
Also, minimum wage can be addressed with a one time bump and after that, make tax brackets, 401k contribution limits, etc. multiples of the federal minimum wage.
There’s a movement called Georgism that advocates for abolishment of all taxes, except for a land-value tax. (“Land” being any extractive natural resource use.) It’s really the only fair tax system. At the risk of oversimplifying it: All wealth comes from a combination of natural resources and labor. Natural resources belong to all of humanity, so it’s not fair to give ownership of them to well-connected individuals or firms to profit from extracting and selling them. On the other side, an individual’s labor is the only thing that people have that’s entirely their own. It’s not fair to tax individual labor, like an income tax, as nobody else should have any claim on its value. Thus, the taxes to run a society should come from the use of humanity’s limited store of natural resources/land, rather than have value which belongs to us all disappear info the pockets of a few individuals, while most people must work to justify their existence while the value of that labor is siphoned away.
Capital in the form of machines, buildings and tools is also important in the creation of value.
Machines, buildings, and tools are themselves products of natural resources and labor.
This is true, as the constituent parts of the instruments are the act of labor forming natural resources into the instruments.
But this isn’t necessarily relevant to the processes of production. The role of the instruments is to assist labor into effectively and efficiently creating the product. They are enabling and organizing labor. This is capital.
We should never forget that all forms of capital are created through accreted layers of labor. But in terms of value creation, the must be seen as capital because the instruments serve a productive process resulting in a product that is valued by society. As such, capital is in conversation with society.
To highlight the above, I’ll create an egregious example. We could argue that all labor is essential natural resources as all bodies are just made of matter anyways. But labor is directed through the needs of the laborer and society. Through a mixture of consciousness, intention, and creativity, that labor creates something of value for themselves and others.
Capital, in my understanding, is akin to this in the productive process.
It is a beautiful philosophy, but the issue with a land tax is that it is regressive, meaning the poor pay a larger portion of their income than the rich. If you look at detached suburban homes, from 100m² single floor starter homes to 1000m² mansions, the size of the lot is about the same. If you look at high density urban housing, a skyscraper full of luxury condos uses less land per occupant than cheap multi-family homes.
It seems to make the most sense in Soviet style ultra high density housing where the poor live 4 to a shoe box while the rich have luxury country estates.
I took a while to ponder this point, to respond without writing a novel. To keep it brief, I’d say that whether it’s a regressive tax depends on the structure or the tax rates. Here in the U.S., poor people most definitely do not own houses, or at least not houses in high-value locations on lot sizes anywhere near the lot sizes that rich people own. Only people with money own big lots in high-value locations, like desirable city centers.
Our property tax system already contains terrible perverse incentives, such as taxing the value of land and buildings, which means that rich people can afford taxes on an expensive house, and middle-class people get slammed with taxes on additions and improvements to their houses.
Poor people rent, and landlords have the same perverse inventive to avoid fixing up their properties. Their taxes are lower if they let their buildings decay, keeping them just above the condition the building code requires.
Why a land tax? Many (most? all?) towns and cities have a real estate tax.
Good question because I think land value is important.
Pretty much every country in the west has a housing shortage. There is no free land anywhere downtown so you can’t just take some land and build on it for free.
With real estate tax. Let’s say you have 3 patches of land around the central railway station downtown. You have huge office building on one, you have a old, crappy by modern standard, home and you have a vacant lot that the owner can’t be bothered doing anything with. They all get taxed three different amounts. In fact by taxing them different amounts you are encouraging the market to devalue assets on that land to minimise their taxes.
If taxes were based on the value of that land it would incenitivise you to maximise the space. So a 1 person home would end up paying 10x that of a 10 home apartment complex per home. Low cost housing would be cheaper, lavish estate homes would be costlier.
If you want a market oriented fix to the housing crisis, to low density, to lack of public transport, for people buying land and sitting on it doing nothing, for rich people not paying taxes on thing and just holding onto wealth they have inherited. Then land value tax solves all these issues, or at least encourages it.
(I still think corporations should be able to own homes. It’s a fantasy to expect the hosuing system to be better without it. But I does need fixing LVT is a way to help fix it).
youd be better off making a plan to seize power.
those measures are good and all but your current kings wont let it happen.
Abortion is important, but constitutional amendments are difficult so let’s make it count: bodily autonomy. This includes abortion but also assisted suicide, personal drug use, tattoos, gender reassignment, and much more.
I feel like that could backfire. The antivax movement would use it to try and kill off all compulsory vaccinations leading to a resurgence in otherwise rare diseases. ERs would hesitate to perform lifesaving operations without consent over fear of being sued later.
Then there is the question of who makes bodily autonomy decisions for children and people unable to make decisions for themselves. If parents, you could see an increase in religiously motivated mutilations. If the state…
A few years ago I would have said the courts would impose sanity over these extremes but that no longer applies.
People already do medically unnecessary genital mutiliaton to babies (circumcision). Parents have autonomy over their children until they reach the age of reason, or they become legally adults. I think pregnancy would have to create legal adulthood.
ER and Good Samaritan laws already indicate that when unresponsive, consent to save a life is implied. You can do CPR on an unresponsive person without repercussions.
For the vaccines, people should definitely be free not to do it, but then they are not admitted to public school. They are quarantined when they go to a hospital. They cant travel on airplanes or public transit. Just like you’re free to get face tattoos but some people might not want to look at you. Should we outlaw face tattoos? No, that should be unconstitutional. I don’t have a face tattoo and I don’t think anybody should, but I would fight for their freedom to make their own choice. It doesn’t have to be a good decision, it just has to be their own decision.
Of course there are details to hash out and decide in the courts, but that is the case with all good rights, even freedom of speech.
You are more optimistic than I am. I worry a particularly “slanted” Supreme Court might interpret school vaccine requirements, quarantine, etc. as coercive violations of bodily autonomy.
Maybe if the amendment had a limited public heath exception and some protections for doctors. But the wording would be tricky.
After what China allegedly did during Covid, I think we should think very carefully about the specific conditions of a legalized and forced quarantine.
Yeah, that’s why any exception would have to be narrow and carefully worded and I’m not even sure it would be possible.
Both risks are pretty bad. Make the protections too strong and people will abuse the privilege. Too weak and governments will abuse the exceptions.
Eh, maybe I’m overthinking it. Even the first amendment is understood not to protect certain kinds of speech. Although sometimes I wonder if those exceptions could survive if directly challenged in our modern situation…
Well in the fears you’re describing I’d rather err to too much freedom. Like in most situations if somebody doesn’t want a vaccine, doesn’t want to wear a helmet, doesn’t want to whatever it doesn’t impact me in any way. And I don’t want them trying to legislate the specific grey zone that makes abortion illegal. It’s clear as can be. If it’s not your body, it’s not your choice. If it is your body, it is your choice.
Sometimes those choices have consequences sure. Like wearing a helmet can be a condition for riding a motorcycle on a federally funded road. Just like having a license or wearing a seat belt. Being vaccinated can be a condition for sharing a confined space with others in public. There could be tax breaks for being vaccinated, for example. But I believe very strongly in bodily autonomy, with almost no exceptions.
The biggest thing to spell out would be about parental control over children. Parents want full control but I don’t even think they should have it. That would be heteronomy. I think bodily autonomy rights should protect babies from medically unwarranted circumcision. I think babies and children should be protected from unwanted tattoos too. Just like kids are protected from child abuse. There can’t be a minimum age for this human right, you have the right when you are old enough to express it. There are children who want to get vaccinated without parental consent and that should be allowed.
Wait, do we actually ban tattoos somewhere in this country?
In South Carolina it’s illegal to tattoo above the neck.
(E) It is unlawful for a tattoo artist to tattoo any part of the head, face, or neck of another person.
Oh for fuck’s sake. Up to a year of imprisonment?!
I guess nobody has been prosecuted for tattooing eyebrows or permanent makeup yet.
