How to Fix Politics
1. Give everybody 2 votes per election, 1 for your own district and 1 for any other district of your choice, to increase political accountability. If a Michigan senator gets too much pork for his home state, the suppliers of those dollar (voters in other states) can express their opinion at the polls.
2. Redraw the boundaries of congressional districts based on alphabet, instead of geography. Congressperson #1 would represent people with last names starting with AA through AE, #2 would represent AF through AH, etc., making it harder to bring home pork to a particular region.
3. Adjust federal income tax rates in each congressional district by the amount of spending your representative has voted for - the more spending, the higher the taxes in your district. That would sure help solve the "rational ignorance" problem.
4. Abolish withholding, and make ALL taxes due on April 15, including sales taxes, and provide an itemized statement of how much each taxpayer is actually paying for defense, agricultural subsidies, e.g. ethanol subsidies, etc.
From the chapter "How To Fix Politics," in economist Steven Landsburg's excellent book "More Sex is Safer Sex."
I'd add one more idea: Change voting day from the first Tuesday in November to the first Tuesday in April following April 15.
1 Comments:
I love the blog and some of the entries have been very humorous and well thought out.
Of course these are all ideas that would improve politics. Go to any campus in the USA and you can find someone with a great set of ideas that would make great improvements in the politcal system.
The Challenge.
Politics, and fixing politics, however is not about having great ideas, it's about implementing them. With all the inspiration a blog entry like that gives me, in less than a fraction of a second the thought that it is impossible (so far, unless we can figure out how to impliment them) to see these ideas come to fruition is heartbreaking.
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