Forums / Discussion / Serious Debate

I've been thinking about this for a while. Most of us agree there are some flaws to American democracy at this point, mostly along the lines that party manipulation and corporation intervention are all too common. I'll say my views in a bit, after this thread picks up a bit.

To explain what I mean by fundamental, it's stuff that effects the meta of politics. Party reform, Voting Reform, Corruption reform, Media reform, etc. You get the idea right?

Imprison only drug dealers; imprisoning addicts does nothing to stop the supply.
Require also women to sign up for the draft. "But women can't-" You can do fifty push ups; no reason why you can't sign up.
Pull out of NATO. I know I'm being a dick here but having to pay 75% of the budget for NATO is fucking ridiculous. Germany and such have their own military; no reason for us to pay so much money when they HAVE a large military.
Remove the electoral college; it's unamerican to have the presidential election be the one not decided by the people. "But mob rule-" You know who else thinks that logic? Commies
The best way to fix corporate intervention in elections is to remove the electoral college; right now corporations can swing a entire election by focusing on a few select states. Removing the electoral college means they would have to change the entire minds of all fifty states instead of 5.
College grants be handed out in according to how useful the degree is. The usa is economically switching to a stem industry so having most of the money be put towards those fields is smart. On the other hand most humanities degrees are fucking worthless. Name me one job shit like "gender studies" or such is useful for.

Merge our military branches into one branch. Sadly a lot of money is wasted on red tape.
Make our own tanks instead of commissioning them. You know how much money is wasted on commissions? Hell some tanks are fucking worthless cause of their flat bottoms making them prime targets for IEDs.
Make our own planes for our military? Only 138 F-35 have been made cause in practical use they're fucking worthless? "Nuh-uh" They barely have any armor meaning that in a dogfight if they do get hit the pilot is 100.00000% certain going to die. Why would you make a military vehicle that is a death trap for the one using it?

I agree with a lot of things you've said, though I think a warning to the nations of nato that can afford the military to step up would be better than straight pulling out, NATO is a key part of maintaining the alliances that ensure the entire world doesn't hate us, and it gives us more influence in the UN. It'd be better if we could force their hand to contribute a bit instead of abandoning that cornerstone.

I would also add that we should work on gerrymandering, and acknowledge that political parties are a thing and regulate them in federal law. Right now political parties have little incentive to be democratic in primaries and play fairly, other than state-by-state law. The ideal of independent politicians ruling the US was a nice founding fathers dream, but it's just not happening.

Here's an oft-forgotten one: relaxing zoning regulations around some of America's largest and most productive urban centers would grow the economy by up to $2 trillion. There is no other economic proposal that would even come close to producing so much growth so quickly.

Oooh, good point particle mare

abolish the state and the capitalist mode of production

Completely end the drug war. The government has no business restricting what substances adults put in their bodies. As it stands criminalization of drugs only serves to land people in prisons (often for the profit of private prisons) and discourage people who are addicted from seeking help.

Do away with, if nothing else, the "first past the post" part of the electoral college. I understand and am sympathetic to the idea that less populous areas have different concerns and might need protection from tyranny of the majority by inflating their numbers, but I'm not fully convinced that it is worth not giving everyone an equal vote. Regardless, the first past the post system ensures that no one who votes differently from the majority in their state has their vote count in any way.

End gerrymandering.

Change ballot access laws to a uniform requirement for all states and set the bar, if any, incredibly low, so that anyone who is serious about running can appear on the ballot.

Lower the cutoff for the Presidential election campaign fund from 5% to 0.5%

Get rid of ticket quotas for cops, or any sort of financial incentive for police or departments to boost the number of people they fine/pull over/arrest.

Make cops wear bodycams.

Reorganize the way that police are trained so that violence is an absolute last resort only to be used in self defense.

Stop making America the world police. It's often a cover for imperialism.

If we're modifying without replacing the electoral college, then we should also do away with the state laws that are winner-take-all with electors. Giving a 55% majority in the state all the votes of the 45% is blatantly undemocratic and can happen in any state with enough people. If you increase the amount of votes proportionately, you have to proportionately represent the vote between those electors.

Personally I disagree with the whole of the electoral college. There's a lot of people who are underrepresented in the state, like minority groups and whatnot. We don't hand them extra votes though. Even in cities there's poverty, with gangs and homeless people walking the streets. You don't just devalue the rich urban folk, you devalue their votes too, and maybe their poverty is less likely to be addressed as a result. I can't support making someone's vote count less because of where they were born and live.

Reform public education. Redesign the curriculum to better serve the needs of an economy and reality of the 21st century. Fully implement a voucher system which would force a market-pressure on schools to hire better work force.

Reform government bureaucracy. Abolish significant power of public-sector Unions. Trade end-of-career benefits for better pay. Force a major technological upgrade and shrink the bureaucracy by at least 50%.

Reform licensing laws, and any other arbitrary barriers of entry to employment. Get rid of stupid licensing laws which have a major impact on entrepreneurialism, and barrier of entry.

Reform the welfare system to focus on cost-effectiveness, efficiency, and flexibility. I would even make it a constitutional fact that welfare expenditure cannot exceed 25% of the Federal Budget. Modernize the entire system by utilizing online services.

Reform the election process to better allow third party and independent candidates to be able to debate, and compete with

Allow to expand on your original post:

Increase the budget for court-appointed lawyers by allocating spending from the Military budget. Public Defense lawyers are severely underpaid and overworked because too many people can't afford private attorneys.

Put domestic terror groups back in the spotlight of law enforcement. The current Administration has de-prioritized domestic terror groups in favor of combating foreign terrorism. We can't turn a blind eye towards these people.

We also need to end corporate America's obsession with cheap labor.

Yeah I should have clarified. The “first past the post” system is the same thing as the “winner takes all” system.

Copyright reform. Current laws are way too draconian and constantly abused.

Ohhh, gotcha bonaparte. See I was thinking of the voting debate in the UK, where they have equal population single delegate districts, and the plurality winner of those equal population regions gets to vote. That's also called first past the post, even though every delegate is representing a majority in a region unlike the US, where extra delegates for regions don't represent the region's opposition minority.

They were debating alternative preferential voting, so you can vote towards your ideal party and if it loses transfer it to your second pick, so people could pick say, the libertarian party, without screwing over the more viable republicans

I always viewed that as a pipe dream for the US to ever do that kinda alternative vote, though as long as we're in a two-party system it hardly matters

I personally think a change in the drug policy and maybe a slight change in gun control would do nicely.

Marijuana should be legal. It's effects are too moderate to have the same legality as bath salts and heroin. It would also help increase the sales of snacks and fast food, as pot smokers tend to get cheap and quick food to satisfy the munchies.

Drug users should not be imprisoned or have a criminal record. Instead they should be forced into rehab. At this would be free but if they continue to abuse drugs afterwords they should be fined an ever increasing amount so they don't drain taxpayer money.

Regarding gun control I would personally like the Firearms Owners' Protection Act of 1986 to be modified to remove the new machine gun ban. The tax could be increased so your average shooter couldn't get them. This isn't a must for me but I do have a fascination with guns.

Make lobbying illegal, place a carbon tax on gasoline to experiment ways to curb pollution, increase the amount of money fined to corporation demands so that they can't win more than they lose when they do something shitty and then lose the eventual demand.

I agree with ya NO!, but i gotta say, your name is hilarious for forum posts starting with a question. it shows your name as the last poster, and it just comes across as someone just going NO! to whatever's suggested.

Thanks for solution. Oh wait you didn't give any.

Proportional voting for congress, would end gerrymandering in an instant and also allow some minor parties into congress.

Direct STV voting for president without electoral colleges. Would allow people to vote for who they want, but be ok with someone they can settle for. Also, gets rid of people winning the presidency because of how the colleges work.

Change voting to being on a weekend, or even more than one day.

Heavily restrict amount of money allowed in political campaigns and donations. Don't allow people to keep what is in their "war chest" as that's just a legal bribe.

End private prisons, private prisons have a financial incentive for re-offending.

Transfer all money spent on "the war on drugs" to the health system and treat addicts as sick people rather than criminals.

Detach the healthcare system from the parasitic insurance industry that makes the US spend nearly twice as much on healthcare than the rest of the first world, while still having a lot of people not covered.

Scale back the US Army, Airforce and Navy slightly, and spend a lot more on 5th domain warfare capabilities. The next great war the US will fight won't use tanks and planes, it will use data.

End the concept of "internships". It's a way for people who can afford to work for free to get a leg up on those who can't.

End tipping and actually pay servers properly.

Learn to play cricket, if the US got into cricket instead of baseball, that would be awesome.

I agree with a lot of what you said Vomkrieg, but I think there is room to consider tougher donation limitations than that, assuming what I say outweighs the negative effects of cutting down donations, which i'm unsure about:

Even if politicians aren't allowed to keep the donations they get, there is still a high incentive to keep appealing to those high-paying donators over the common voters due to re-election. If they don't help that bill they want get through, they won't get the promised re-election money to get back into office. But re-election also incentivizes making decisions that actually appeal to their base, rather than being unaccountable. It's a sorta catch-22 in that regard, re-election requires politicians to follow through, but what they follow through on is biased towards the richer end of their supporters. The only solution I can figure is to either place a really low "max donation" or accept that corruption in that less severe form will always be present.

Actually just noticed you said heavily limit donation amounts, man I'm being redundant in this thread, oops.

christ i wrote a whole manifesto, sorry guys

Reformatted it a bit

Alright, time for me to chime in. All the suggestions are things that I believe politicians themselves are unlikely to bring up themselves, as it throws their stability out-of-whack, and influence voting and how politicians represent their supporters. Most other issues could be brought to vote by regular old “party A or party B”. That’s typically what I meant with fundamental reforms, though I’m a-okay with all the other ideas in this thread and encourage that to keep going.

Electoral College: The ability for electors to make their own choices is a ticking time bomb for a popular vote failure, the first-past-the-post system is not representative of the states, and the guaranteed 2 votes for states rather than raising the amount of votes proportionally so the lowest population state has some votes, leverages some votes over others. There’s the defense that it helps rural folks be represented, but we don’t do that for other disadvantaged minorities.

The way mob rule is prevented is through the first amendment and letting people see all the problems out there for different peoples and show different ideas, not giving extra votes. And with the modern internet age, it can be argued that the first amendment is more effective than ever, since every single viewpoint you can think of has some corresponding site supporting it. It’s to the point where people argue that it’s a bad thing and it’s gone too far.

The news sites can be more clickbaity, less likely to verify their news (hence the boom of the phrase fake news), and some major sites can censor views unfortunately, but there’s still websites for every view you can think of, and people are being convinced by them to take different sides. I do question if media reform should happen, to try to make the media more reliable, but I’ve yet to find a way that doesn’t have orwellian possibilities. If you guys have any ideas of that nature, or logic that suggests it can’t be done at all, I’d be interested.

Corruption reform: Set a low max donation amount, and make sure donations for campaigns can’t just be pocketed. This prevents bribery and legally biasing the candidate towards wealthier supporters.

However, I think congressmen and other politicians should be paid a significantly high amount tied to inflation. The goal is to minimize corruption and favor representing the voter base as a whole. The former two take care of the legal ways, but the third part is the realistic solution to the fact that they could get around this outside the law. Gonna have to pay them for not being a bad person, as sad as that is. And that might not cover the people who really love excessive cash, even still, but hopefully the risk of losing such a good paycheck convinces them not to be corrupt.

Perhaps there are other solutions though, like having a constant independent group making sure nothing is fishy with the finances, but something tells me politicians of the most powerful state in the world could get around it.

Gerrymandering: Establish a standard, perhaps using computers if necessary, of how much the districts can deviate from the popular vote/natural compactness. We can’t enforce a law against intent to manipulate votes, we need a standard to make sure districts are representative by definition, in a way that isn’t wishy-washy opinions on how the districts look funny. There’s some mathematicians working on the issue, and I think it would be wise to defer to their judgement here, they’ve also come up with some pretty good voting systems. Speaking of which…

Voting method: I feel this is very unlikely, but I would be very happy if some day we could establish a different voting method than our current one. Currently a vote for a libertarian party is a lost vote for republicans, and a vote for the green party is a lost vote for democrats. This happens without the electoral college, as congress doesn’t have an electoral college choosing them and it’s still like this. This is the spoiler effect, and while it centralizes parties into neutral mass appeal (which has some proponents), it also prevents some viewpoints from ever seeing the light of day.

There are alternative voting systems that reduce strategic voting and the spoiler effect, so people can vote how they feel while still not harming their overall chances, and while the proposals vary a lot, almost all of them are better than the current first-past-the-post method in ways that are mathematically formalized. There’s a good wikipedia article on them, though it notes that as long as a voting system has a certain group of arguably ideal properties, there’s no completely perfect voting system.

However, both major parties in the UK didn’t like this idea when it came to referendum, and killed it off by convincing the public it was heavily flawed since "the first person you vote for doesn't always get your vote", so I have little hope for it. It would help parties in the US diversify away from supporting them, as you can imagine, and we could be freed from our two-party system.

Party reform: Believe me, I’d love if we could pretend parties aren’t ingrained in democracy, that we could have independents as the primary force, but as long as there needs to be coalitions to get majorities, political parties are here to stay. But they are not obligated to follow a strictly democratic system, or even be that fair (superdelegates, anyone? regardless of your opinion of his socialist ideas, that’s a really establishment-biased system). They also vary in how you can vote in them state-by-state. I personally feel they should be formalized, so they are properly democratic and treat states equally, though I’m personally unsure if primary elections should be closed, semi-closed, or open.

Voter Fraud: There’s a lot of ideas passed around that fraud is common in elections, and that we need more validation of people being citizens and only voting once. I have some doubts about that theory, but why not be more secure? Here’s the thing though, most voting fraud prevention ideas disenfranchise certain voters, by making complicated hoops to jump through or fees to voting like paying for your driving license. Unsurprisingly, some of these laws were struck down for being biased against minorities, as politicians on any side like to eliminate threats to their success.

So here’s my proposal. All citizens at birth, are registered as being citizens (in ways that make sure they are recorded as distinct citizens even if they have the same name), and given a national id card. You finish legally becoming a citizen, you are registered as a citizen and given a card. You lose this card? You go to your local dmv, and you get another for free or the cheap price to make the card, depending on if you want to support card-losers with taxes in case they’re super poor. You verify your vote with said card. While unfortunately most Americans often reject the idea of such an id card, using a social security number allows for identity theft, and driving licenses aren’t tied to citizenship at all and are biased against the poor. A state-issued ID card is the best way to prevent fraud without disenfranchising people.

kinda shaky idea: I’ve also floated ideas about changing the senate to be less about representing states that people don’t really identify with, and more about being an impartial force not beholden to political shifts as much. Essentially, people who would judge house bills with the good of the nation in mind rather than party interests, because they have certain benefits like a high paycheck or long guaranteed terms that last long enough for them to be satisfied. Kinda like the house of lords in the UK without all the stupid traditions, chosen by the people but not pressured to act this or that way afterwards. But I am VERY unsure about that idea, just something I’ve pondered a bit. Currently the senate is kinda arbitrary, yknow?

Voter fraud is the electoral equivalent of having to take your shoes off before boarding a plane in the US because that one time some dude tried to light a shoe bomb. It's is nowhere near the issue that it is made out to be.

Compared to a voter turnout of around 50% for presidential elections. It's a smoke screen at best, and actively creating disenfranchisement at work.

I've never seen a democratic country so obsessed with not having people vote. It's weird.

I agree Vomkrieg, but I figured that'd be a way to end the debate and prevent it from possibly happening, with minimal disenfranchising. I also have some eyes towards the future, as the US's current level of corruption could lead to vulnerabilities in elections being exploited, as they are in less democratic countries that supposedly vote for their politicians.

My goal was to remedy most flaws people said were present in American democracy from all sides, even the right-wing views of it. Of course, I do have some leaning here though, I'm against the electoral college after all. Perhaps some reforms are completely unnecessary due to how rarely it has an effect, but that would require a lot more research.

I think we should also ban foreign donations to political parties and candidates. That makes it so foreign countries/corporations won't be able to mess with the elections. Besides, if it involves the American people being governed, than only the American people should be allowed to lend monetary support.

First Past The Post: There needs to be change in the system, it doesnt proportionately represent the parties in the UK. The big examples of this is that in the 2015 elections the SNP gains nearly all the Scottish seats when only around half the country voted for them. It makes votes wasted.

Ending Austerity: Otherwise all our services will collapse, these are not just national pride, its practical and essential that the police, nurses, firefighters have the proper funding. There a visible problem with these services, and austerity still hasnt ended despite being told it is, there are still cuts and even where there are rises, they are even less than inflation so its still a cut.

SORT A FUCKING BREXIT PLAN OUT: At least have a direction, do something, anything.

Try reforming your bs economic/financial system…………..politics controlling big business and not big business controlling politics?

Shame the rest of the world…………..just follows(nl sigh)

Mzzls

Japan is even worse about copyright and needs to do that as well.

Anyways, I think that the military spending needs to be reduced, a reform of the education system needs to happen and some age restrictions need to be less schizophrenic.

How's this? Instead of having the voters cast ballots have the candidates actually have to personally pass out (and I do mean personally as in the candidate hands the "ballot" to the voter and cannot use a surrogate). Then on election day the voters "cast their ballots" by showing up, identifying themselves (they have to be on the roles of those to whom a politician handed a ballot) and casting their ballot into the box. If you needed a secret ballot you could simply give the government a list of names and that list could be combined into one list so that nobody but the voter and the candidate knows -- AND the voter could be free to "accept" the ballot from more than one candidate, but could only "cast" a single one in each race.

Of course the whole thing would be ridiculously impossible to actually do, but it would be fun watching! LOL

AJ