A majority of Americans back building a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico, according to a new survey. The new Monmouth University poll found that 53 percent of respondents support ba…
There’s a lot more than just unrestrained greed wrong with the US, although that is a big source of problems. Democracy is broken in a variety of ways as well, only some of which could reasonably be attributable to the economy. Ultimately there’s no single thing you can point at and go “fix that one thing and we’re good”, there’s a bunch of interconnected problems that all feed on and reinforce each other. That makes it particularly hard to solve problems because any solutions are half measures since no single solution addresses all the problems.
As just one example, our government does not represent the will of the people. There are many reasons for this some intentional, some not.
On the intentional side we’ve got the electoral college and the Senate. The founders feared that an eloquent populist could get elected by exploiting an ignorant populace (oh the irony). As a check to this they expected the states to be run by more educated and politically savvy individuals that would be less swayed by a populist and thus the EC could prevent their election. Likewise the Senate was meant as a check to Congress, since Congress represents the interests of the people, like the Senate represents the political leadership of the state.
On the unintentional side we have gerrymandering, voter suppression, first past the post voting, and unrestrained political funds. The first couple items on that list should be self explanatory. First past the post voting leads to a system that’s only stable when there are only two viable parties. This in turn also drives the parties to extremism to try to differentiate themselves from each other as much as possible. It actively punishes moderation and compromise. Into this mix then comes unrestrained political funds which drive the all important advertising, but also are used as bribes both to and from politicians. Ultimately the ones “donating” those funds in many cases are doing so with the goal of getting legislation passed or repealed that benefits them, which is a big part of how we’ve ended up with unrestrained greed.
We need to fix all the problems, we can’t afford to focus solely on one, but we also can’t get so obsessed with finding the perfect solution that we never make any progress. Fixing employment is one part of the problem. Proper taxing and making sure the incentives there are aligned is another. Providing a path to citizenship for people both domestically and elsewhere as well as providing incentives to encourage the kind of workers we need is another piece. Removing dark money and unrestricted (and unmonitored) political donations is also a piece of the puzzle. So is switching to a better voting system like STAR. The electoral college absolutely needs to go, as recent events have shown it actually makes the thing it was supposed to protect against possible. We should probably also rethink the Senate in general, it may have served a purpose in the original version of the US, but following the civil war and the strengthening of the federal government it increasingly makes no sense.
These are all problems the US has that need to be addressed, but this isn’t even remotely an exhaustive list. I didn’t even touch on our economic issues and things like how we’ve allowed corporations to grow to obscene sizes that never should have been tolerated due to nearly unchecked consolidation. Or how we’ve allowed the rich to skirt taxes and hide wealth in ways that are difficult to track.
Ah, sorry I meant they weren’t intentional in the way the US government was originally designed. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the unrestricted funds are intentional by the people who have set them up. The FPTP voting is an interesting case as I don’t think it was intended to have the result it has, but now that it has the two parties are very dedicated to preserving it
There’s a lot more than just unrestrained greed wrong with the US, although that is a big source of problems. Democracy is broken in a variety of ways as well, only some of which could reasonably be attributable to the economy. Ultimately there’s no single thing you can point at and go “fix that one thing and we’re good”, there’s a bunch of interconnected problems that all feed on and reinforce each other. That makes it particularly hard to solve problems because any solutions are half measures since no single solution addresses all the problems.
As just one example, our government does not represent the will of the people. There are many reasons for this some intentional, some not.
On the intentional side we’ve got the electoral college and the Senate. The founders feared that an eloquent populist could get elected by exploiting an ignorant populace (oh the irony). As a check to this they expected the states to be run by more educated and politically savvy individuals that would be less swayed by a populist and thus the EC could prevent their election. Likewise the Senate was meant as a check to Congress, since Congress represents the interests of the people, like the Senate represents the political leadership of the state.
On the unintentional side we have gerrymandering, voter suppression, first past the post voting, and unrestrained political funds. The first couple items on that list should be self explanatory. First past the post voting leads to a system that’s only stable when there are only two viable parties. This in turn also drives the parties to extremism to try to differentiate themselves from each other as much as possible. It actively punishes moderation and compromise. Into this mix then comes unrestrained political funds which drive the all important advertising, but also are used as bribes both to and from politicians. Ultimately the ones “donating” those funds in many cases are doing so with the goal of getting legislation passed or repealed that benefits them, which is a big part of how we’ve ended up with unrestrained greed.
We need to fix all the problems, we can’t afford to focus solely on one, but we also can’t get so obsessed with finding the perfect solution that we never make any progress. Fixing employment is one part of the problem. Proper taxing and making sure the incentives there are aligned is another. Providing a path to citizenship for people both domestically and elsewhere as well as providing incentives to encourage the kind of workers we need is another piece. Removing dark money and unrestricted (and unmonitored) political donations is also a piece of the puzzle. So is switching to a better voting system like STAR. The electoral college absolutely needs to go, as recent events have shown it actually makes the thing it was supposed to protect against possible. We should probably also rethink the Senate in general, it may have served a purpose in the original version of the US, but following the civil war and the strengthening of the federal government it increasingly makes no sense.
These are all problems the US has that need to be addressed, but this isn’t even remotely an exhaustive list. I didn’t even touch on our economic issues and things like how we’ve allowed corporations to grow to obscene sizes that never should have been tolerated due to nearly unchecked consolidation. Or how we’ve allowed the rich to skirt taxes and hide wealth in ways that are difficult to track.
These things are intentional.
Ah, sorry I meant they weren’t intentional in the way the US government was originally designed. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the unrestricted funds are intentional by the people who have set them up. The FPTP voting is an interesting case as I don’t think it was intended to have the result it has, but now that it has the two parties are very dedicated to preserving it