What are your important issues? (1 Viewer)

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    wardorican

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    Forget the current headlines. Forget the manufactured talking points. What are the big issues you care about? Or the small ones that don't get enough attention?

    I'm just going to rattle off a few. I may dig into these more later. In no special order...

    1. Infrastructure investment. The major categories being road transportation, flood protection / drainage, electrical grid resiliency, and better mass transit, especially rail. Our rail systems, outside of a few areas like Chicago, NYC, DC.. are just awful. They don't serve enough of the areas. They aren't tying the Suburbs, and towns nearby to the major city centers and major concentrations of Industry.
      1. A - I'd have much preferred no tax cut for the wealthy, and use that money towards Infrastructure. I don't mind some of the corporate tax cuts (not a fan of profitable companies finding ways to pay $0 in taxes.. that's unfair), but take a little back to go towards infrastructure and mass transit, which will boost productivity and lower congestion in major cities.
    2. Wage growth. Not just min wage, all wages. Not sure what the government policy could be to drive this, but it's a huge pet issue for me.
    3. Technology. Finding the balance between a company being large enough to have stability/security (think Apple, Microsoft, Samsung) to have things work well, but no so large as to stifle all competition and drive up prices. Also, who controls/owns our data. If my data is so valuable, why can't I be compensated for it?
    4. Education funding. It's ridiculous how much the States cut from Colleges and how little they controlled their growth since the 1990's. That's why tuition is out of control. So, it's not just the funding issue, but also the lack of forcing public Universities to cap operating budget increases. In college, tuition increases was probably one of the biggest things I tried to fight against when in Student Government. We usually failed, but I did get one win on that topic, when I realized the committee that year was being somewhat dishonest about the increases, and called them out in public about it.

    I care about a lot of other things, but I'm going to stop with these four.
     
    The obstacle to more extensive charitable activity is money.

    Instead of creating a government program to replicate what charitable organizations do every day, the money should be directly provided to those organizations to increase the reach.

    However, many of these organizations are necessarily religious in nature, although not all.

    There would be objections.

    And the over regulation that comes with government involvement is also a major issue.

    Charities tend to be less efficient at getting money/help to those who need it.

    Some of which is due to too little oversight. See Trump's "charity" for an example.
     
    Since this is a philosophical discussion and I am restricting myself to the current system, I would allow individuals the ability to earmark up to 50% of their annual federal tax liability to be transferred directly from the treasury to charitable organization(s) involved in activities that directly support human society.
    So is it fair to presume that this re-direction of federal tax dollars would come exclusively from social programs?

    If so, is this simply a philosophical desire or an operational belief? Or both? And if it is the latter, do you have any evidence that suggests such a system would be sufficiently managed to cover all the needs the current system currently does at the same level of output? Because, for instance, we have tried handing off a lot of government functions in things like Medicaid, Medicare, and food programs to non-profits and such and almost always efficiency and output drops. As an example, It's just logistically cheaper and simpler to hand a person a debit card and put limits on what they can purchase with that card to minimize abuse than it is to send money to a thousand different food banks and ask/hope volunteers/staffers can purchase enough of the right goods and distribute them at the same levels. And people are also not a hive mind, much like the craze with breast cancer, which is incredibly flush with donation money while more pressing and deadly forms of cancer go dry, such a system almost certainly risks problems of prioritization wouldn't you think?
     

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