You can make 3 permanent changes to the way your country is run--which 3?

In My Humble Opinion
81

Well, the current system of “The data and being able to interpret it don’t matter here. I got a healthy suitcase of cash from Comglomco and I know what their lobbyist wants…in fact, he was kind enough to write the whole piece of legislation for us, so we can head to the golf course early today!” isn’t exactly working great either.

The main “expertise” most national-level elected politicians develop is how to coax tens of millions out of donors and lobbyists while learning how snow the public more effectively, so they can vote how the donors want while still giving lip-service to what the public wants.

But I do totally agree that the ability to think and aggregate and evaluate different data sources would be one of the most important job qualifications for politicians (hence my own proposed solution of only superforecasters being electable), I just don’t think we’re anywhere near this at the national level today.

82

Keep our representative form of government but draw these representatives at random from the general populace, much like jury duty. And make it just about as fun, with no possibility of making any money off it and severe penalties if you do.

“Fuck! I was just selected Senator for a 2 year term! I’m going to lose my job, my wife, and also go bankrupt!”

83

I think term limits is an better idea in theory than practice. I remember reading when CA implemented term limits, the lobbyists ended up having more experience with how things worked than the legislatures and their influence actually grew. Politics is a skill that takes practice and experience. To me, public funding solves the problem better as the legislatures no longer feel the need to be bribed to make money to keep their job (unless they are shitty people who are committing a crime which in that case there are laws against that).

84

I know I posted three proposals above, but I just had a thought.

Make the districts for the United States House Of Representatives based solely on population size regardless of state borders. One representative for every 400000 people.
This would increase the number of congressman to over 700 so we might need a bigger House chamber.

85

It means that the party officials don’t get to run the elections. They’re in an inherent conflict of interest. The elected reps also have a very limited role in drawing the electoral boundaries.

[ul]
For instance, I was gobsmacked in the 2000 US election, when it turned out that the state official in Florida who got to decide whether to certify the electoral votes for Bush or Gore … was the chair of the Bush election campaign in Florida. Yep, pure impartiality there![/ul]

[ul]Then I found out that the boundaries are drawn by politicians. [/ul]

[ul]Then I found out about how hard it is to get on the ballot, for president and for state offices, if you’re a third party, with no electoral record. You’re Democrat or Republican, and that’s about it.[/ul]

[ul]Then I found out that the federal Elector Commission is composed of equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats, so they almost never exercise their powers when there’s any political controversy.[/ul]

[ul]Then I found out about sore loser laws - that if you don’t get the party nomination, you’re barred from standing for election in the general election.[/ul]

[ul]Most recently, I found out that if a dispute comes up about whether someone is eligible to be nominated in North Carolina, it goes to a board that is made up of party representatives, who vote the party line to decide if the person should be eligible to stand for election.[/ul]

[ul]And of course, voter id laws that seem designed to make it harder for certain segments of the population to vote.[/ul]

None of that happens in the system I’m familiar with, Canada.

[ul]Elections are run by an independent, non-partisan body. If there’s a dispute, it goes straight to the courts. No political review. (And the courts are non-partisan, not elected.)[/ul]

[ul]Boundaries are drawn by independent bodies, with political representative, but chaired by a judge. The legislature can refuse to accept the boundaries, but never does, because of the importance of having fair, non-gerrymandered bodies. Governments which have gerrymandered tend to get kicked out.[/ul]

[ul]It’s easy to get on the ballot; usually just takes about 200 signatures of supporters in your district.[/ul]

[ul]It’s easy to establish new parties, and to get them on the ballot. For instance, in our House of Commons, there are currently seven party affiliations (although two of them only have one member each). Of those seven parties, the oldest (Liberals) dates back to Confederation in 1867. The next oldest (New Democrats) was formed in the early 60’s. The next one (Bloc Quebecois) was formed in 1991. After that, the Greens, formed in the 1990s. Then the Conservatives, in 2003, and Quebec Debut and the CCF, both formed in the past half year. (Although they both have asterisks, because the MPs in those two groups were elected as BQ and NDP in 2015.)[/ul]

[ul]A sore loser law would be unconstitutional. Parties don’t have that kind of authority. You have a constitutional right to stand for election.[/ul]

[ul]Our voter id laws have extremely generous rules to enable a person to show their eligibility, and if there’s any doubt, they can swear themselves in. (I’ve actually had to do that on one occasion, when my voter registration got mucked up after a move.)[/ul]

86

Thanks NorthernPiper. I missed Red Wiggler’s question but I don’t think I would have given half as good an answer.

87
  1. Term limits for all elected officials.
  2. Switch toAlternative Vote system.
  3. Massive reduction in government power in every feasible way.
88

Three things?

  1. Truth. Law that forces news outlets, politicians, bankers, gossips, everyone to provide proof of any statements they make, and accountable (sliding scale of fines) for violating.
    (note that this law will be rather unpopular in many sectors of the population, for example religions will not like it at all)
  2. Allow alcohol, allow drugs, allow weapons. But make punishment for any crime committed while under the influence be greatly increased. Make robbery with a gun be punished double or triple that of same crime without gun, for example.
    (The plan here is to cut out both the source of income for 90%+ of criminals, and also to eliminate most of the ‘excuses’ used by criminals. A drunk driver that kill someone should not get off because they were drunk, they chose to be drunk)
  3. Make people personally responsible, when they f-up, not the group/organization/company they represent. Example: bad cop caught planting evidence? Sue the person not the department. No more of the state carrying the idiot, no more of insurance company carrying the idiot. Both of these just end up punishing the honest guys that get increased premiums.
89

I like these, although I think #1 is less important. Real tax reform would do great things for the country. #3 is good, too.

Here’s my list:

  1. The USA has this thing called the Constitution. It must be the law of the land, and anything government does that is not in the Constitution immediately ends. No more Department of this or that creating regulations that strangle citizens and destroy our freedoms. If the People don’t like what the Constitution says, they must go to the trouble of amending it.
  2. No Deficit Spending. None. Nada. If the government doesn’t have the money in hand, it cannot promise it or pass a law about spending it. If they could only spend money the government actually has, Congress would have to allocate funds to true (and don’t forget Constitutional) necessities.
  3. Voting Reform. Standardized tests including US History and Civics must be passed before a citizen’s (yes, citizen!) vote counts. But even if the test is passed, the voter must have skin in the game. If they collect more government largess than they pay in taxes, their vote must be reduced proportionally. The less you pay into the system, the less your vote counts.
90

Well, there goes Mitt Romney’s 47%!

Why not just make it more explicit, and have a “you may only vote if you own and can show proof of at least $100k in assets” or something along those lines?

As though our current system wasn’t kleptocratic enough already. :stuck_out_tongue:

91

Most of the changes suggested so far have been surprisingly … tweaky. On the assumptions my country isn’t going to be dissolved for a few hundred years but the form of the goverment might warp into unrecognizability in that time:

  1. All laws have to include a statement of purpose, and ‘this law is not serving its stated purpose’ is grounds for challenging a law in court and getting it invalidated. For example, if a state lowers its minimum wage for the stated purpose of raising the total employment rate, and the employment rate does not in fact rise, any interested party could sue to get the law invalidated and the minimum wage would return to the previous rate.

  2. All laws get a ‘sunset provision’, to keep the corpus of laws relevant and comprehensively small. (Not ‘one person could read them all’ small, I know that’s impossible, but ‘one person could read all the ones they might run into when starting a business’ small.) Sunset provisions cannot be longer than 35 years (approximately a generation), except for the Constitution itself, which gets 70 years for the sake of stable government. Laws can be renewed starting 5 years before their sunset date.

  3. Officies of government influence, including ‘voting citizen’ and ‘person with officially recognized rights’, that have a warm-body eligibility requirement (for example “be born here”, “live here for the last 10 years”, “be born more than 18 years ago”, “be of a particular race/gender/species”) must have a way to bypass the warm-body requirement with a relevant test that at least 10% of people actually in the office could pass. This is both to lessen the chance of prejudice or nativism taking over the government and becoming entrenched, and to provide an easy way to extend rights to groups for whom it simply hasn’t been relevant yet, such as AIs or visitors from other planets. As an immediate bonus it would mean sufficently motivated young people could vote.

92

And how does limiting folks to 12 years (or whatever your term limit is) fix that issue? Hell, I need to demand larger payoffs if I know I’ve only got a few years to collect.

I’m glad to see people speaking out in this thread against term-limits, which are one of those “seems like a good idea but actually sucks” thing that are popular with people looking for easy solutions.

93

To each his own. I feel more allegiance to Nevada than I do the USA. Perhaps it is because my family has been in this state since the 1920s… when Las Vegas had a population of 2,000.

94

Oh, term limits don’t fix that issue at all, which was part of my point - yes, our politicians are ignorant and don’t know how to think or use data to make wise decisions, and that’s because they have zero incentive to do so.

Instead, we directly incent them to take suitcases of cash and dispense legislation favorable to the suitcase-givers, without regard to data or “expertise” in various issues that’s supposedly built up by not having term limits.

So my point is that the issue of politicians having expertise and being able to make wise decisions or not is basically orthogonal to term limits either way, and either removing or keeping them won’t make any difference to those things either way as long as the incentives are still aligned behind “the only opinions that matter come with suitcases of cash.”

I in fact agree that if we had a class of actually competent and trustworthy politicians who actually wanted to make good decisions, term limits are counterproductive.

95

Dang! Nobody has chosen the obvious options.

  1. For each election cycle (Presidential, House, Senate, etc.), each state will be randomly matched with another state. Then they will vote for each others’ candidates. IOW, if SC is matched with CA, the SC voters would vote for CA’s senators and representatives and vice-versa.

  2. For each election cycle, all voters have to cast a vote for the person they most want expelled from Federal government. (It can be the president, a senator, a representative, or someone else.) The top five in votes get escorted to the DC bus station and given a bus ticket to anywhere.

  3. All candidates for Federal elections are only permitted to have their campaigns funded by the Federal government. Limits will be $15M per qualifying candidate. (We’ll have to figure out how to qualify them, I guess.) Candidates may, on a specific date set forth in the Constitution, gather in one location and wager all or part of their funding in a marathon of Texas Hold-em poker. At the end of the poker marathon…well, that’s the funding you have to campaign with.

I’m a big believer in keeping everybody fairly happy, not just the people in your district or your constituency.

96

I’m curious what you’re thinking the results of this will be - given the country is basically 50/50 split, all this seems like is a recipe for “it’s a coin flip whether your legislators for the next term are going to be ok or directly repugnant to both your local and national interests.”

There’s also a numerical bias for solidly Conservative states (at least 20) vs solidly Liberal states (14), meaning the net effect of this statewise pairing is likely to flip more of the country solidly Conservative, thereby upsetting the current 50/50 balance. And that’s before any gerrymandering (largely responsible for the current Congressional Republican dominance).

So given these downsides, what were you thinking the upsides are?

97

Ban all smoking in public
Ban all hand held devices in public
Ban all Trumps from speaking in public.

I’m sensing a theme here.

98

You guys aren’t thinking big enough.

  1. Switch from our current representation to a Westminsterian parlimentary system. While the current craziness re:Brexit doesn’t speak well for it, in general it allows for a more responsive government AND the inclusion of third parties and less overall power to one or two dominant parties. The negotiation required for coalition governments brought about by electable third parties encourages moderation and a bit more creativity on the legislative front.

  2. Instant Runoff Voting with a 60% threshhold for election.

  3. Require all laws to have a 5-year sunset provision. To continue to be on the books representatives should have to make an active on-the-record act to keep them in force. Want the PATRIOT ACT or the Voting Rights Act to stay in force? Revisit the debate each time. It’ll keep things fresh in the public’s eye and force a reconsideration of laws should public opinion change over time.

99

I like these but I’m one of about 53 parliamentarian fans in this country. I’m not sure about how the 60% threshhold would work, though. I’ll toss in the idea that each congressional district should contain seven members who are elected through proportional voting.

100

And what happens when CA gets paired with WY? We have more representatives than they have voters!