Ok. So, after giving it a lot of thought, and hashing out my ideas with Gemini, this is how I would fix our society, top to bottom if I had the power and capability to do so.
- No more income tax - IRS dissolved
- High sales tax in general, with NO TAX on food staples (any natural, low-preservative foods without artificial colors and dyes, HFCS, and other low quality ingredients)
- High property taxes on non-primary residences (primary residences < $10 Million exempt, and active farmland exempt)
- Banks receive 0% interest on reserves from the FED, and to keep them from blowing up the economy all at once, we start them with a 15% reserve requirement, which decreases by 1% each year.
- Banks restricted from overdraft fees, low balance fees, and yearly fees. If you don't have the money in your account, the transaction is blocked, not approved and fined.
- Publicly traded companies will be incentivized for long-term growth.
- Share voting is multiplied by how long you hold the share, < 1 year = 0 share votes, 1-4 years = 1 vote per share, 5-9 = 2 votes per share, and 10+ = 3 votes per share
- 80% of executive compensation must be held for 5 years
- Reporting changed from every 3 months to every 6 months.
- Regional monopolies (Hospitals, ISPs, etc) are treated like regular monopolies with anti-trust reform applying
- Focus on common carriage infrastrucutre with corporate "providers" (Like UTOPIA fiber) in most areas
Energy
- Nuclear mandate - We rollout Small Modular Reactors nationwide to solve our energy crisis once and for all
- Single use plastics are treated like Lead and Asbestos
- We focus on Aluminum and Glass and bio-plastics where necessary, which can all be recycled with near 100% efficiency (particularly with the nuclear energy we'll have)
- Also use nuclear power to desalinate and distribute water to solve water scarcity issues.
- Also use nuclear power to power AI
Education
- Student loans are interest free while pursuing a degree, and 100% forgiven upon graduation.
- Dropouts retain low-interest 1-2% interest debt. Retakes and completion of degrees are encouraged.
Health
- Every citizen receives $4000 (or so) annually that they are allowed to spend on medical and healthcare (like an HSA)
- Unspent funds are kept, tax free at the end of the year by the citizen.
- If you spend all the $4000, your remaining healthcare needs are covered by the government.
- Hospitals are required to provide a full list of services and their costs to keep care reasonably affordable
- All water flouridated
- $4000 dependent on vaccine compliance, regular checkups, and dental checkups (i.e. Health strongly encouraged, but not required)
Transit
- With nuclear power everywhere, we can also power low-cost high speed trains between cities across the nation.
- Government owned rails, corporate owned trains that compete for "on-time" contracts
- Light rail and commuter trains that focus on inward flow in the morning and outward flow in the evening
- AI powered timing to reduce waiting in general
- All last mile streetcars and busses have:
- Traffic priority
- "Handshake" with parent rails (i.e. their goal is to arrive at the rail station before the associated train arrives, and after the associated train leaves, providing 100% transfer of passengers as quickly as possible)
- High taxes on gas/oil, personal cars in urban areas
Technology
- Global communication platform
- End to end encrypted, decentralized
- Infrastructure supported (but works without infrastructure, peer to peer, albeit somewhat less efficiently)
- Discord-like, but servers and groups are owned and managed by their creators and supported by their participants and ISP infrastructure (blindly. ISPs can't see group messages without being a part of the group)
- Locally owned and operated AI models
- All government funded infrastructure and architecture must use open-source technology and open-weight AI for transparency
- Right to repair and massive penalties for planned hardware obsolesence
Politics
- Ranked Choice Voting
- Open-weight AI redistricting to avoid gerrymandering
- Politician stock trading treated the same as insider trading
- Tie salary to GDP (per capita)
- Lobbying fact checked by the same open AI and is publicly available for citizen view
- Serving in government office precludes you from a job as a paid lobbyist
- Voucher based campaign funding
- All campaign money goes to a pool, and citizens can pre-vote a portion of the money to the candidate of their choice
- Big corporate donations no longer go to backing their candidate, but they go towards the pool that goes where citizens choose
- This also allows people to campaign for notoriety, for future elections, even if they don't "win" they can get their name out there so they'll get more funding next time.
- AI models for gerrymandering and lobbying fact checking will be chosen based on popular vote (and must be open models so their choices can be independently verified.)