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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.