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.
Oh man. My husband is a journeyman electrician (IBEW). He is 57. Has had a hip replacement. He is hyper-focused on his diet and tracks all calories, hits the gym 5 days a week. Yet he has bone on bone arthritis in his shoulders, his left knee has no meniscus and he has popped his IT band 3 times in the last 4 months. He is on a job that has gone OT, tons of ladder climbing and stairs. Meanwhile the shoppie employees huddle with their phones while he is responsible for the switch gear. He really wants to retire. He has his full pension credits.
I am a nurse (60) with 27 years experience. I just spent a weekend on service and there was very little transport staffing. I ended up having to transport the patients to the nuclear medical dept and then wait. One had to travel on the tele so I told his nurse to bring him down and leave the equipment. After his testing was done... I hooked him back up and brought him to his floor and of course, the bed was out of battery charge WAFB, I was worn out.
We are both retirement curious. I was thinking... maybe get all our expenses on a spreadsheet, star the ones that can be reduced or eliminated, get all our most recent sheets together and see a financial advisor. We are kind of tired of carrying the 30 somethings honestly... We are Gen X and actually didn't expect we would live this long. Honestly... we have kept our communities running for a long time and are ready for others to take over.
Personally, I 'd love to go somewhere like Portugal or Italy for a few years and wait out this MAGA mess. Our kid lives less than 3 blocks away though and we do want to be involved grandparents. It is a difficult choice in these times. I hope we can convince them to come with us. The fact is... this nation under Trump will become a prison if you wait long enough.
Hold up. You're 60 and on Lemmy? That is super cool. I hope I'm that cool when I get there.
As for moving away, I noped out to Korea just before Trump. Just coincidence of timing. Expat life is great, but be ready for a hefty dose of loneliness unless you can get in on the language. You can find other expat communities, but you end up needing to be less picky about your friends, which isn't necessarily bad.
In any case, I hope your husband catches a break and lasts too retirement. Good luck with everything
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.
For other countries yes, but the US won't vote again
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.
They can have that when they start serving the got damn people like they're supposed to
In every possible way, I don't want skilled professionals as representatives. Even if you get one they are only a skilled professional in ONE, maybe TWO areas - COMPLETELY inadequate for the vast number of areas the government is tasked with managing. That specialized knowledge is what the career bureaucrats the administration is gleefully firing are for.
I want someone who can ASK and LISTEN to skilled professionals, detect and reject bullshit from scam artists, and feels a responsibility to make decisions that benefit their constituents. There are 10 year olds that fit that description.
See that's where limiting CEO pay comes in.
the whole stock trading thing is largely a result of how little congress people are payed relative to the importance of the position.
Completely unreal. Given an opportunity to legally trade on the information available to them people with 6 and 7 figure salaries will act identically to maximize their benefit. At present in many difficult and valuable professions you can obtain the best of the best for less than what congress is paid. There is no reason to believe that lifetime benefits, 174k and the prestige of leading the nation is insufficient to attract excellent candidates.
If the candidates presently in play are often trash it is because other factors select for same not because of insufficient compensation.
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.
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.
Fuck off.
No.
Dream big. Get balls.
Yes.
A Reality TV star who diddled kids, hid top secret documents in his bathroom, and openly agrees with all of the USA's enemies is now President, jail free, and has ham fisted the stupidest people alive into a laughablely unreal kakistocracy that nothing else in human history compares to.
This is the fantasy of the biggest idiots alive and it has very much become real. And now that CEO murders are up significantly more than usual, you wanna believe paradise can't be achieved because the idiots did it first?
Please. It's a numbers game. And there are far fewer idiots than those who are now suffering from them.
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.
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.
Keeping congressional salaries that low would encourage corruption and possibly discourage non-corrupt candidates with valuable experience, but I otherwise agree.
yeah, grand scheme of things a few hundred people getting a salary that's comparable to what they'd get in industry, makes zero difference to total government revenue.
The only reason to make it lower is either out of some weird sanctimonious need to put them in their place, or some idealistic notion that lowering salaries would result in a congress full of serene monk-like sages who exist only to serve their people, when the reality is that it would heavily incentivize even more corruption than we see now.
Give them a million dollars each, and tax them 100% on every penny they make from any other source.
That minimum wage pretty slim for a wish list...
Tie minimum wage to inflation. Tie rent to it, too. Im suck of having this discussion. They stonewall on purpose.
All of this should be simple for any sane politician to get on board with, and yet it's somehow revolutionary.
Giving pledge? How about a taking pledge.
Proposed wealth tax:
The proceeds fund UBI. MMW we will have 100x as many millionaires after doing this.
$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.
Caping their pay like that would assure only rich people could become politicians in poor districts.
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!
You think you're getting another election?
UBI would be nice too, especially as the reliance on AI/automation becomes more prevalent
It's cute you think there will be another election. I mean, there will be elections ... but they won't mean anything. The idiotic half of the US is realizing too late that the "conservative" party is the party of evil.
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.
So... I was gonna say that's Citizens United, but... I realized that's only for campaigns.
Anyone know what mechanism allows lobbyists to have the access they do? Or is it just that there's nothing barring it?
Except no one will bother voting for this because the dems are just as bad because they're not giving away free unicorns or something /s
I'm thinking more that no one will vote for the dems, because the dems don't actually try to get any of this through?
If they wanted ANY of this through, they could have done so multiple times the past 10, 20, 50 years, but no. The dems do not want to accomplish this list. It is NOT part of the democrat policies.
Dems aren't for any of that, let alone all of it.
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.
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.
Cap CEO pay at no more than 2x lowest paid employee/contractor in terms of total compensation.
Bring back civil rights
Came in late but I'll bandwagon that the minimum wage needs to be bumped up.
If we can actually get back in power after they rig or cancel elections, yes!
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.
Lot of defeatism in the comments. You know who didn’t plan on defeat? The project 2025 assholes. Fight! Fight fire with fire!! Fuck anyone that doesn’t get on board. Project 2028, general strike, death to fascism!!
Raising minimum wage won't do shit, just cause more inflation. Deal with the real problem, cap the highest paid employee at 10x the lowest paid employee. CEO wants a million dollar salary, has to pay the grunts 100k first.
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