/r/50501 Mirror

Tax All religions, it's a business. Make everyone pay into Social Security, no income caps. Move retirement age back to 65 for everyone, and early (reduced benefits) to 62.

Like I get the whole moralistic bent about not wanting to pay representatives big incomes relative to their constituents because politician bad and “they should be doing it for the pride of serving”, or like term limits because “I don’t like these politicians and they keep getting reelected/ serve life terms.”

But realistically, if you want skilled professionals in a field, you need to pay them competitively and offer long term career prospects. Otherwise you’re going to only get people who take the job as a stepping stone to another position, like a high paying job at a big company they passed a bunch of laws to help, or who can make money in other ways.

As it stands right now, the whole stock trading thing is largely a result of how little congress people are payed relative to the importance of the position. Like, sure, it’s a six figure salary with a great benefits package, but, that’s peanuts compared to what a modern private sector executive make, even a mediocre one.

If anything, congress people should probably have their wages increased significantly.

Keeping congressional salaries that low would encourage corruption and possibly discourage non-corrupt candidates with valuable experience, but I otherwise agree.

I refuse to believe any of this is actually endorsed or supported by the Democratic Party of The United States.

It's all great. And I'd love to be wrong. But there's no way.

$20 minimum wage is still too low, but better than nothing. Decent outline. Just have to get someone that gives a shit about people into office.

The only way you’re going to close the wealth gap is by taking it back from them. At this point it’s the only option. The democrats are compromised too completely.

Giving pledge? How about a taking pledge.

Proposed wealth tax:

• 1% over $1M
• 10% over $10M
• 100% over $100M

The proceeds fund UBI. MMW we will have 100x as many millionaires after doing this.

Caping their pay like that would assure only rich people could become politicians in poor districts.

All of this should be simple for any sane politician to get on board with, and yet it's somehow revolutionary.

Sounds great.

Hope you've got your guns, because you'll need them for any of that.

Voting is just for deciding what colour tie your right-wing authoritarianism wears.

Came in late but I'll bandwagon that the minimum wage needs to be bumped up.

Lmao. Unless step number one includes some guillotines, you might as well be asking people if they'd like to go to paradise.

Pure fantasy.

That minimum wage pretty slim for a wish list...

I'd like to add to this that there needs to be limits to how many terms a congressman can be in office and that afterwards, they are unable to fund anything related to lobbying or government officials. Also, kick them off insurance for government officials and cut off their government official salary permanently when out of office.

I'm impressed with this, someone has clearly given it more than 30s of thought

treating unrealized gains used for collateral as income avoids most of the complicated issues around wealth taxes while still enforcing that you have to pay your fair share if you want to live a life of luxury.

Congressional pay caps seem like a good way to align their incentives with helping all their constituents rather than just the donors and median mean that passing a real minimum wage law is to their direct benefit. No idea how you would get around the increased risk of bribery though.

Fixing gerrymandering, replacing fptp and scrapping the electoral college evens out the voting power so an election is less likely to be swung imby a handful of close districts in swing states.

Striking down Citizens united would (could?) clean up campaign finance making it harder for fossil fuel lobbies (for example) to purchase power.

I don't know how feasible it is given some of it is federal, some of it is state level and I imagine some of it requires ammending the constitution, but I would consider any candidate who ran on some/all of these to be a good choice focused on fixing the root causes of a lot of the problems the US is facing.

UBI would be nice too, especially as the reliance on AI/automation becomes more prevalent

Ranked Choice is a bad system to use for elections.

And that's per its inventor, the Marchese de Condorcet back in the 1790s.

He came up with the instant runoff idea, and then tore it to pieces because of how poorly it performed. i.e. Instant Runoff almost never gives you the Pairwise winner, the person who would win in a direct one-to-one matchup against every other candidate.

In the 200 years since then, we've found other, more serious problems. Like the fact that the system is somehow not monotonic. Meaning that increasing the support to a candidate can actually cause them to lose the election.

There's more, but the main point stands. RCV is broken beyond repair.

A system that is not broken is STAR. Designed from the ground up to be a modern voting system.

Fun fact, while strategic voting is possible under STAR, it actually gives worse results for the strategic voter just being honest in your preference. Which is opposite of how pretty much every other voting system works.

Shouldn't this be project 2029?

I support this platform. Expect nothing less, accept nothing less. Look at the pipe dreams on the other side of the aisle they've been able to enact. Let's swing the hammer hard the other way now.

Cap CEO pay 35x lowest paid full-time employee

Remove “Full-Time” from that, it’s an obvious loophole that would make the point moot.

You forgot ban lobbying.

Cap CEO pay at no more than 2x lowest paid employee/contractor in terms of total compensation.

Sure, all of this would be great. There's no chance of it happening, though. We're at a point where either we rise up and take what we want or it'll never change. And we're basically incapable of rising up. Prove me wrong!

Extend benefits to all employees. Make employer contribution for part time employees125% of employer contribution for full time employees. Make school vouchers illegal and get all kids back into public education. Eliminate media conglomerates. Nationalize the assets of any billionaire who paid for a cabinet position in order to destroy the agency that regulates their industry. Tax the wealthy and corporations.

Okay, hold up. Not all of these are federal.

Ranked choice in all elections - that's a state thing.

As for the congress trading and income caps, we want to do that for state representatives as well, right?

I'm guessing the billionaire and mega church taxes would also need to be state level, since there's nothing necessitating them crossing state lines.

I'm all in, but wanna make sure the effort is in the right areas.

Also, I prefer approval voting over ranked choice. And let's covert the House of Representatives to proportional representation instead of district-based, and let's do the same for state level representatives. And let's trash the Senate, or at least change it such that small groups of people don't have significantly more power just because they live in the middle of nowhere.

Also, donation info? Website or something to participate? The hell kind of call to action poster has no call to action???? I really wanna get in on this shit.

Capping congressional salary that low is a bad idea - especially with the cost of maintaining homes in their district and DC both. It heavily encourages corruption.

I had a good family friend who was a small business owner. He was the local AC repair guy who worked super hard and built a thriving business. He eventually got into politics and was elected to the US House of Representatives. I was proud of my friend, because while we didn't agree on a lot of political issues, he was fundamentally a good person and would be different than all the corrupt assholes in government.

He quickly ran into financial issues trying to maintain 2 households - especially since his wife was essentially forced to leave her job to be with him full-time as he went back and forth between his district and DC.

So what did he do? He started accepting help from donors. Then special interests. He started becoming more and more beholden to them as they supported him, and he started getting a taste of the Washington lifestyle.

Now he's as corrupt as corrupt gets, and I'm ashamed to have called him a friend. Motherfucker even voted against election certification on January 6th.

I truly believe that if Congress paid better, more "Average Joe" politicians could thrive in Washington without having to take dirty money, and my family friend may have been saved.

Make the government fearful of the people.

CEO pay should be max 7x (do they honestly work 7x more than their lowest paid?).

And minimum wage should be $25/hour or more (with additional increases based on cost of living a d inflation).

2 of those require a constitutional amendment which is a high bar to meet. Also personally prefer approval voting to RCV, it's easier to explain, works with existing machines, and eliminates the spoiler effect.

Bring back civil rights