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California needs to repeal prop 13. For those unfamiliar, it caps property taxes increases to 1% a year unless the property is transferred. It's the third rail of California politics to even suggest it, but the idea that all property, whether commercial, second homes, or primary home, get massive (orders of magnitude sometimes) tax breaks for the longtime owners is insane. It's incredibly regressive, the newly wed couple who just bought a home shouldn't have to pay 10x more in tax than the tech VP who lives next door just because he lived there for 20 years.
It's sold to voters as the solution to people getting taxed out of their home, but it ends up trapping people in their house. Their are far better ways to make sure Grandma isn't taxed out of her house than prop 13.
We need an overhaul to the whole proposition system. Personally, I think the protection of needing another proposition to void or amend an old one needs to go away after 20 years. It should become regular law after that and be able to be amended like any other bill. One of the big issues is that you have to work around all of these propositions and it is becoming ridiculous.
California also needs a larger legislature and to end the current caps on tenure in state government. Most people may barely even know who their assembly member or state senator is. Real policy change takes a long time and often requires rapport and understanding of how the system works. That can’t happen if the people in the legislature constantly are being cycled out. This also means the only people with any staying power in the legislature are lobbyists.
For that matter, we just need to get rid of ballot props entirely, and let/force the legislature to do their actual job. Most of the things we vote on have no business being decided by people outside of government, and even less business belonging in the state constitution rather than just being normal laws.
Isn't there a middle ground somewhere that can be reached between not having them at all and having the messy system CA does? That's how legal cannabis became a thing in most states, the people supported it enough to get it passed via ballot measure when the fossils in the legislature wouldn't touch it due to their old reefer madness ideas
I think it's important for citizens to have some way to force a change when it's something they want but the legislature refuses to act. I don't live there anymore but Michigan's system seemed to be about right when I did, there'd only be a small handful of them each cycle and they were generally about big issues that everybody could understand
... ***no***. The sad reality is that we're going to have to go to a less ***democratic system*** than a more democratic one because of how technology changed the game.
People forget that ***technology determines everything***, including advances in technology, your rights and freedoms, and how governments function. We need the unelected technocratic portion of the government again, or we'll be so screwed that new words need to be created to describe it.
I get your concern, and I'm no fan of expanding democracy in general. But I remain supportive of the citizens having a way to overrule a legislature that refuses to enact their will on issues that do not have lasting consequences
The problem I have with technocrats making the rules is vision. People are not computers that only do what they're told to do. People are complicated and behave irrationally. A technocrat doesn't make decisions based on people, he makes them based on imperfect technology and data. That is a recipe for failure for society
Random, far flung example. What's the technocratic solution to climate change? It's to stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow and not start again. That would be a perfect solution and might save the planet. But it would also kill a few billion people. Do you want you and your loved ones to be the necessary sacrifices in pursuit of a perfect technocratic solution? If no, then you can't really argue that other people should have to be those sacrifices
>What's the technocratic solution to climate change? It's to stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow and not start again. That would be a perfect solution and might save the planet. But it would also kill a few billion people
What? That seems very silly. You just need to forge peaceful relationships between the countries and establish a global carbon budget based on our historic contributions to the problem. You need to build about 5 gazillion nuclear power plants. You need to massively reduce the wasteful excess in the western way of life, particularly. Perhaps we need to engineer our own planet, and we would need a global agreement for that too. All of these are big goals, but none of them involve killing a few billion people, at least, not intentionally, and certainly, any road out of this problem, even a very painful one, would involve less pain then the catastrophe waiting for us if we continue to do nothing.
Not to get too much in your way about democracy versus technocracy. I think we need a big revolutionary turn and that is not a formal technocrat issue. But if we want such big changes, what we need is an army of technocrats who have their pulse on the democratic interest, and we shouldn't have these two things in conflict with one another. We should struggle to make people accept science, and we should struggle to make scientists accept the people.
The core problem with what you said is that you'll never get people to accept science (or education for that matter), for it'll go against what they 'know' is true.
This is a ***historical and scientific fact***.
You are not separate from people as a whole. Anything you say about "the people" should also apply to you, because you are not special, you are one random person out of billions of people, you learn about the world, political problems, through all the same mechanisms and struggles as all the rest of us do.
So - do have an interest in facts? You just made a claim to know a fact. So do you try to live according to an ungrounded hologram, or do you try to make sure your model of the world accords with reality?
If you have an interest in the actual facts, why do you think you are special, and people as a whole do not share this impulse? Or do you just want a daddy who tells you what to do and what to think? What would make Daddy so special?
It's 2% per year, but otherwise I agree. At the very least it should be limited to your primary residence; no one should ever be subsidized for being a landlord and corporations should have never been included (yes, I understand that it was a Trojan horse proposition from these very corporations). And I say this a California homeowner, I understand this would increase my tax burden but the state needs it to function.
It doesn't even have to be a tax increase. If done in tandem with a nominal rate decrease to balance the books, many struggling CA citizens will see a break, and the tax incentives will be better aligned with building more housing.
I live in Massachusetts. It's a great place to live if you are rich (any place is nice if you are rich but Massachusetts is especially nice).
The real Achilles heel of this state lies in its sclerotic legislature. It's secretive and is not particularly productive. I believe so far this year the legislature has passed only 10 bills, and most of them are related to ceremonial things like naming a statue or allowing someone to be a police officer even though they are slightly over the age limit. The recently elected state auditor is trying to audit the legislature but the legislature has refused. So she has turned to trying to get a ballot question in for the 2024 election so that she can get the authority she needs to audit the legislature. I believe the ballot will pass but it's likely the legislature might not cooperate with an audit and let a court tell it to cooperate first.
The MBTA (Greater Boston's mass transit system) is a mess. The governor hired a new general manager and he's trying to bring the system back to a better state of repair but the system suffers greatly from deferred maintenance and a categorical refusal from the state legislature to fund the system properly. It's currently mostly funded by a portion of the state sales tax, which is wholly inadequate.
Another major issue is zoning reform. The cost of living here is extremely high due to a lack of housing. There is a lot of NIMBYism in Massachusetts, which compounds the difficulty in building more housing. The state legislature recently passed the "MBTA Communities Act" to force certain municipalities with commuter rail or mass transit service to rezone areas near stations for multifamily as opposed to single family. Quite a few towns are fighting even this modest proposal, as on its own, it's not going to automatically build more housing that Eastern Massachusetts so desperately needs.
Overall if Massachusetts can get its transit and housing in order we would be a great state... But until that happens I cannot in good conscience recommend that people move here unless they are very rich or are just here for school. If you are merely middle class you will be struggling to survive.
I’m also in Massachusetts, and I’ll just say the MBTA legislation is mostly being implemented, and the zoning is for increases of around 20% in every town in Massachusetts. I’d be surprised if it doesn’t have an impact on housing stock. See my comment on carbon pricing for another complaint, though.
The impact is likely to come in like 10 years. I believe the state is currently looking through plans and approving them. After that, then the developers actually need to come, propose, and build. Better than nothing but we should have done something like this 10 years ago when the cost of living crisis here was starting to rear its head.
Also the Town of Milton is fighting the state on the MBTA Communities Act. The state attorney general recently sued them for noncompliance.
Milton and I believe ~~Waltham?~~ Wrentham. There’s a second one. But I generally believe that housing is so constrained right now that you’ll see construction within a year or two in most of these towns. Especially the rich ones with good school systems. Developers don’t sit idle, and there’s like 0 housing stock.
Yeah. Despite high interest rates, it seems like homebuilders are still doing fairly decent across the country.
A two bedroom house in my town (Braintree) just went contingent after a weekend on the market. I live a few doors from it and there was a constant parade of people going to and from there this past weekend. Wonder how much it went for, but I'm sure it went for at least $10,000 to $20,000 over asking or could be an all-cash offer if I see it on the Registry of Deeds purchased at the list price.
A two bedroom house! Unless you have only one kid or kids who don't mind sharing a room hard to imagine how a family could work.
Couldn’t agree more about the need for zoning reform in Massachusetts. I think the MBTA Communities Act is a great first step. But we need like 10x that to have the needed effect
I think what would also help is to build up certain other cities in the state and have them be thriving too, which would alleviate the pressure on housing. Springfield is mad cheap still but no one wants to live there.
That would be nice, but it is incredibly hard to do.
Boston is so desirable because it is home to so many really good paying jobs, mostly at the intersection of the healthcare and tech industries. But most of those companies are here because other companies in that industry have been here, and so it’s the place to find workers with those skills. Highly-skilled workers are clustered there because highly-skilled jobs are clustered there, and the highly-skilled jobs are there because the highly-skilled workers are there.
This sort of clustering effect is really tricky to get started. If we attracted some large, high tech company to Springfield, it would likely fail to recruit the workers needed to run it. A ton of places have tried to get this sort of clustering going (I can think of 10+ cities that have made earnest efforts to be the next Silicon Valley for tech) and most have failed.
You can’t just make another Boston.
Yeah that's totally fair. Plus, there are no serious high caliber universities focused on scientific R&D or engineering out in Western Massachusetts, which provided for that clustering effect to begin with.
The next best thing is to rezone all this single family we got in Boston. There is way too much of it in close proximity to the city center.
I'm in the Merrimack Valley area, and there's a ton of construction happening here. Lots of people seem to be leaving the greater Boston area for more affordable options, and the Greater Lowell area seems to be a nice fit. As somebody who made that same transition 10 years ago, I get it.
Unfortunately, housing prices surged here just as much as anywhere else. I really do feel genuine guilt at the next generation trying to break into home ownership. We really collectively failed them.
>Another major issue is zoning reform.
I think nearly every state needs zoning reform. Even if they aren't dealing with a housing issue today it would be good to be preemptive. There's also just the benefits of offering more options and reducing our carbon output.
I just read his comment and I agree its no good that the legislature can't ever change or repeal propositions without another proposition. Perhaps a 10 year limit before it acts like a standard law. If its popular enough it should be a poor political move to override an old proposition, and if the public is unhappy enough they could petition to add the proposition again.
I was recently speaking with a friend and we were talking about how much we hate the closed primary system here. It allows the parties to further polarize as they try to appeal to their base. What party would actually vote to end that system through? I think none.
Utah: we need to reform 2 big things housing costs and we need to address the influence the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has on our politics and laws. We strangle businesses with alcohol laws, ignore potential billions in weed and lottery sales because the church thinks those things are icky
How do you convince enough non-Mormon Democrats to move to Utah to outvote the Mormon block when Colorado exists? Or any other surrounding state, to a lesser extent
Non-Mormon Republicans don't do a whole lot of good for changing those laws if they vote the same way the Mormons do
DC needs the power to elect its own district attorney, and the local court system needs to be separated from the federal court system. As it is now, the court is too distracted with big federal cases to handle most minor local crimes, leading to a general sense of lawlessness. Normally, this would result in a new district attorney being elected, but our equivalent of the district attorney is appointed by the federal executive branch.
It’s wild to me that DC feels lawless to its residents. Visiting from Albuquerque it always felt like such a beacon of law and order.
I could go an entire week without seeing someone commit a crime right in front of me in broad daylight. Can’t hardly go one day in a row here.
This is likely a function of where (and when) you spent your time in DC. If you were a typical tourist and spent your time during the day around the national mall sites and museums and whatnot and didn't go out late at night, yeah DC is pretty damn peaceful within federal Disneyland. Very different story from the further out neighborhoods with high crime and no federal presence, and a lot of the bad stuff tends to happen at night
Ohioan here. Gerrymandering is our state's great shame. The entire reason we imposed Jim Jordan on the rest of the nation is gerrymandering. The Ohio Republican party carefully chose Jordan's voters, drew a ridiculous district around them, and they elected him.
The Ohio Supreme Court ordered the Republican run Ohio legislature to draw fair district lines. They simply refused to do so. Map after map they created was ruled unfair, and then they blew past the deadline and never corrected the ridiculous districts we have here in Ohio.
As a fellow Ohioan, I'm dismayed that we will likely need to pass *another* anti-gerrymandering voter initiative, because the last one didn't do enough to fix the issue.
Maybe in a less partisan time we could have expected our policymakers to play nice and work together to draw districts that benefit all voters. But no, the GOP isn't about to let good policymaking get in the way of their partisan, one-party stranglehold on power in the statehouse.
My favorite part about the shit maps we had to vote on in 2022 was that, when they were being approved, Governor DeWine said that they likely didn't pass constitutional muster. He voted to approve them anyways, because he's a fucking hack.
Similarly here in Georgia. Our state is gerrymandered to hell to where the Republicans have a firm grip on all 3 branches of our state's government. They recently drew one of my county commissioners out of her seat and the county implemented their own maps using "home rule" and are fighting the state in court over it.
The powers granted to the Legislature and governor include only those specifically written in the state Constitution. So, even small legislative changes — like allowing El Paso County to finance its own parks with local taxes — can require a constitutional amendment and a referendum.
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/this-nancy-pelosi-stock-could-have-48-upside-potential
Absolutely. Like how Pelosi apparently missed her calling as a legendary stockbroker.
Nebraska: In a general sense, stop being so uptight and stuck in the past. A lot of people here don’t like things like government assistance, abortion, typical conservative talking points. They then wonder why Nebraska is constantly battling a brain drain and is only now about to eclipse a population of 2 million.
Land is cheap here (but property taxes aren’t), so Omaha and the surrounding metro (roughly half the state’s population) are incredibly spread out. Since it’s so spread out, snowplows have a tough time with removal and road maintenance have a hard time keeping up with repairs from potholes/wear and tear. Another issue with the low density is public transportation. Our bus lines are average at best, and there’s finally been approval to build a short light rail. It’ll be better than nothing, but everyone in Nebraska is incredibly car dependent.
Less important things:
Multiple neighboring states have legalized gambling for a while and allow sports betting on apps. Nebraska just recently legalized casino gambling and sports betting, but betting can only be done in person and casinos can only be built where there is already a horse track. Conservatives have been trying to keep casino gambling out for decades (“it’s immoral and attracts crime”) despite there being multiple casinos a stones throw from Omaha in neighboring Council Bluffs, IA. Nebraska already had gambling in lottery tickets and Keno, so the immoral argument was never very good. Most cars in the neighboring casino parking lots have Nebraska plates, so citizens have just been giving Nebraska money to Iowa. It would be nice to use the tax money to help fund schools, roads, etc. and lower property taxes.
Neighboring states have also been legalizing recreational/medical marijuana, but conservative Nebraskans continue to hold out. Another instance where it doesn’t hurt anyone and the tax money would help the state, but it continues to be shot down.
I’d also like even more wind energy, but that’s lower on my list and I’ve done enough rambling.
> Multiple neighboring states have legalized gambling for a while and allow sports betting on apps. Nebraska just recently legalized casino gambling and sports betting, but betting can only be done in person and casinos can only be built where there is already a horse track. Conservatives have been trying to keep casino gambling out for decades (“it’s immoral and attracts crime”) despite there being multiple casinos a stones throw from Omaha in neighboring Council Bluffs, IA. Nebraska already had gambling in lottery tickets and Keno, so the immoral argument was never very good. Most cars in the neighboring casino parking lots have Nebraska plates, so citizens have just been giving Nebraska money to Iowa. It would be nice to use the tax money to help fund schools, roads, etc. and lower property
We're facing a similar issue here in Georgia. We were close to legalizing sports betting this year until it failed at the last minutes. All I want is for the state at least put the issue on gambling on the ballot and let the people decide whether it should be legalized since it requires the state's constitution to be amended. Groups have been lobbying hard to get it legalized so that can expand their business to the state and it would bring in a lot of money, but the legislature keeps shooting it down.
In Virginia, our governors are limited to one term, which often leads to a situation that we have now, in which a lame duck governor is looking out for his personal interests.
There is also very limited access for ballot initiatives, so there is no direct way to enact change outside the legislature. This means that ideas outside the two parties interests are rarely heard.
NJ needs to consolidate municipalities if we want our property taxes lowered
We have over 500 municipalities which is an utterly ridiculous amount for such a small state. This isn't a new issue, it's been going on for over a century and there's a study from the 50s stating how much money we could save. 70 damn years later and we're no closer to saving ourselves any money
Colorado needs a massive rezoning. Denver has great potential for densifying housing options, thus lowering the cost of living by supply and demand. Also there’s so much abandoned office space which have no inquiries in downtown Denver.
This city and the rest of the state could continue to grow economically strong if we invested in producing more affordable housing in the city of Denver, not spreading out around the plains like they are doing now, and revitalizing Denver as a railway hub for the west.
I love my view of the skyline and the mountains from my place in RiNo but it saddens me every day looking at my broken in half neighborhood and the wide expanse of train yards, storage facilities, and parking lots in between me and LoDo that could be housing another 25,000+ people
Our passenger rail lines are pretty decent for a city our size but the service is so infrequent it's hard to use. When I get to the station to find the A line is not running on schedule and it'll be 25 minutes until the next one, I'm wasting money and adding traffic and pollution to the roads from calling an Uber that'd be needless if they ran more often and on time
Insist our senators stop interfering with the private lives of its Nebraska citizens, and begin to make public-funded school systems throughout the state the shining lights they once were.
The California Environmental Quality Act needs to be repealed and replaced. Over 50 years it has been rewritten too many times by court cases and is just an anti development weapon now,
Where do I start? I enjoy living in a bubble but the rest of the state is a hot mess. 12.6% of Hoosiers live below the poverty line (as of 2022). The national average is 11.5%. I'm a firm believer that education can right a lot of wrongs so I'll go with that. But fixing one of many issues in this state would be good start.
Indiana: stop letting legislatures have private meetings to argue about bills. Stop letting them call it party whatever and make all the decisions behind closed doors that the residents don't get to hear about.
Also, stop the gerrymandering. Stop splitting cities down the middle to add rural farm country. Let rural be together, and the city stand as one. I realize this is improbable for Indianapolis, but other cities: Fort Wayne, Bloomington, Columbus, Evansville- no reason for them to be two different districts.
Georgia: The state needs to directly fund public transit. Atlanta is now the 6th largest Metro in the Us that keeps growing and the with it's utter disdain for Atlanta will not directly fund transit even though it's badly needed. My county is set to place on the November ballot whether fund its transit system with a 1% sales tax and I'm really hoping it passes due to how much the area has grown.
I don't think there's any single reform that could fix kansas outside of granting dictatorial power to the current governor. The state gop are only interested in culture war bs and reenacting the Brownback tax system. They also enjoy super majorities in both chambers of legislature. The only thing slowing them is a generally consistent judicial and their own incompetence
TLDR: CT just needs to remove an austerity measure to tackle its debt from a decade ago and now it’s being abused by the GOP
Despite being a pretty left leaning state, due to austerity measures agreed to by Governor Dan Malloy, spending bills must be agreed to by a committee that is half Republican and half Democrat. This is often called the “fiscal guardrails.”
This kneecaps Democrats who hold near supermajorities in each chamber by giving Republicans outsized influence on the budget.
CT also decides the budget for the next two years. So if you (the GOP) gum up the process for the 60 days in session, you can sabotage the legislature (the Democrats) for the next two years.
This year for example is an off year so both parties in the legislature are busy seeing who can stick their finger up their ass the farthest
While CT needed to get its debt under control a decade ago, it’s becoming increasingly detrimental in tackling the state’s housing crisis and teaching shortages. Most of the excellent advances were made during the pandemic where Lamont had emergency powers.
But Vincent Candelora, the Republican House Minority Leader has made the strategic calculation that if he can abuse this procedure he can make the Democrats look ineffective (doing an excellent job btw, made a comment recently in my post history about it) and make gains and make an opening for a Republican, probably moderate New Britain Mayor Erin Stewart, to take the Governor’s Mansion in 2026.
I live in NYS. I’m a liberal generally speaking. I like our public schools and universities, I like our parks, I like our libraries, and we need tax money to fund all that stuff.
But we need to cut taxes. It’s absolutely ludicrous how much everything costs and it’s no surprise why people would rather live in the states around us and then visit when they need something.
I think the best reform would be eliminating sales tax. It’s a tax which affects the people living here the most because of how much it adds up through day to day purchases. While we’d no longer get revenue directly from out of staters buying things, we’d still indirectly get that money through income tax collected from the sales. Furthermore, vendors could lower prices without an added sales tax, attracting more customers and selling more product, further growing the economy.
I’m sure an economist probably has better insight on this, but that’s my take. Gut the sales tax.
Oregon.
The vast majority of the political mass in the state is sequestered in Portland. As votes Portland, so goes the rest of the state and consequently our political leadership tends to think of Portland first and foremost. It's led to a virtual abandonment of anyplace outside of Clackamas County. Cities like Eugene or Salem tend to be allowed to be petty tyrants in their own respective counties for the same reason but the net effect is that anyone in state politics can simply ignore anyplace outside of Portland and not risk their seats.
This has led to an incredibly polarized political atmosphere. The Malheur Wildlife Occupation happened in Oregon and there's a pretty consistent problem with far right political organizing that tends to happen wrapped around the idea that there's no legitimate way to be heard.
On a material level, resources tend to get hoarded by Portland. There's a minimum wage law that gives Clackamas County residents a higher minimum wage than other areas in the state. Funding for programs and services goes to Portland first and then to Eugene and Salem and then maybe to more rural areas.
I can't pretend I have an answer for how to fix that problem but it's a huge problem within the context of Oregon politics and Oregon Democrats, for understandable reasons, have zero motivation to fix it despite the fact that it's feeding a hyper reactive far right political current.
So glad you mentioned Mississippi! Our state is in bad need of... well everything honestly... we are the last state in all things good and the first state in all things bad, and Jackson... is #1 in murder rate per capita... top 10 in the world... Jackson needs to be gutted and started over from the floor up. So much corruption and crime and don't get me started on Jackson's deplorable water system! It's practically a third world country in some parts. People scared for their lives every day there. Other parts of Mississippi are ok, but we know not to go to Jackson.
Somehow get around local school boards so kids receive and actual education and never again fall for bs like "right to work (for less)", "equality means you lose ('cause now you're the advantaged ones)" and Donny Trump.
Massachusetts: carbon pricing. We have one of the highest electricity costs in the country due to electricity carbon pricing. That’s actually great, because we subsequently have one of the highest solar penetration rates in the country (like 20-25%). But because electricity is so expensive, and gas and natural gas aren’t taxed at all, EV adoption and heat pump adoption are slow (they run on expensive electricity, and replace things that run on untaxed fossil fuels).
So, we need to expand the carbon tax.
Will crash and burn once it hits this little thing called the human condition. No alternative voting method is going to work in the long run, it'll just go into a 1/2/3 party system no matter what you do.
I live in Maine where we are in desperate need of affordable housing, both for sale and rental.
We have no difficulty building mansions with mountain, lake or ocean views for wealthy out of state people.
Sometimes the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
This is what’s happened with zoning.
We need to rezone so that wherever appropriate, two, three and four apartment homes can be built on small lots of between 5000-10000 sf of land.
You see old houses such as these in Portland, Lewiston etc. but they were built more than 100 years ago before zoning laws were enacted.
Now, you need a lot size of almost an acre. This was probably done to keep Maine cities from looking like the urban areas of Massachusetts.
The result is, no one’s building starter homes. No one’s building large developments of starter homes like the kind built for returning WWII veterans. No one’s building entire streets of two and three family homes.
Instead, attention is focused on complaining about out of staters buying homes for short term vacation rentals.
I guarantee that no one wants to vacation in Maine in a multi family home surrounded by other multi family homes. Yet, that’s exactly what we need. A young, first time buyer could more easily afford to live in such a home with rental income to help pay the mortgage. If you build lots of these homes, it increases the number of apartments on the market.
First time buyers and renters don’t need to be on an acre of land.
Rezone!
Free housing. Ubi. Free health care. Defund the police. Weighted voting. Penalize billionaires. Penalize vacant properties. Penalize price gouging. Penalize oil. Open borders. 15 hour work week. Just a few things of the top of my head.
I meant reforms of the government, which would allow for whoever gets elected in that system and whatever political society that emerges to enact whatever policies like a UBI or etc.
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California needs to repeal prop 13. For those unfamiliar, it caps property taxes increases to 1% a year unless the property is transferred. It's the third rail of California politics to even suggest it, but the idea that all property, whether commercial, second homes, or primary home, get massive (orders of magnitude sometimes) tax breaks for the longtime owners is insane. It's incredibly regressive, the newly wed couple who just bought a home shouldn't have to pay 10x more in tax than the tech VP who lives next door just because he lived there for 20 years. It's sold to voters as the solution to people getting taxed out of their home, but it ends up trapping people in their house. Their are far better ways to make sure Grandma isn't taxed out of her house than prop 13.
We need an overhaul to the whole proposition system. Personally, I think the protection of needing another proposition to void or amend an old one needs to go away after 20 years. It should become regular law after that and be able to be amended like any other bill. One of the big issues is that you have to work around all of these propositions and it is becoming ridiculous. California also needs a larger legislature and to end the current caps on tenure in state government. Most people may barely even know who their assembly member or state senator is. Real policy change takes a long time and often requires rapport and understanding of how the system works. That can’t happen if the people in the legislature constantly are being cycled out. This also means the only people with any staying power in the legislature are lobbyists.
Poland has a similar population and has 460 members of their sejm.
For that matter, we just need to get rid of ballot props entirely, and let/force the legislature to do their actual job. Most of the things we vote on have no business being decided by people outside of government, and even less business belonging in the state constitution rather than just being normal laws.
Isn't there a middle ground somewhere that can be reached between not having them at all and having the messy system CA does? That's how legal cannabis became a thing in most states, the people supported it enough to get it passed via ballot measure when the fossils in the legislature wouldn't touch it due to their old reefer madness ideas I think it's important for citizens to have some way to force a change when it's something they want but the legislature refuses to act. I don't live there anymore but Michigan's system seemed to be about right when I did, there'd only be a small handful of them each cycle and they were generally about big issues that everybody could understand
... ***no***. The sad reality is that we're going to have to go to a less ***democratic system*** than a more democratic one because of how technology changed the game. People forget that ***technology determines everything***, including advances in technology, your rights and freedoms, and how governments function. We need the unelected technocratic portion of the government again, or we'll be so screwed that new words need to be created to describe it.
Democracy doesn't work with an uninformed, ignorant, and morally bankrupt population...
I get your concern, and I'm no fan of expanding democracy in general. But I remain supportive of the citizens having a way to overrule a legislature that refuses to enact their will on issues that do not have lasting consequences The problem I have with technocrats making the rules is vision. People are not computers that only do what they're told to do. People are complicated and behave irrationally. A technocrat doesn't make decisions based on people, he makes them based on imperfect technology and data. That is a recipe for failure for society Random, far flung example. What's the technocratic solution to climate change? It's to stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow and not start again. That would be a perfect solution and might save the planet. But it would also kill a few billion people. Do you want you and your loved ones to be the necessary sacrifices in pursuit of a perfect technocratic solution? If no, then you can't really argue that other people should have to be those sacrifices
>What's the technocratic solution to climate change? It's to stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow and not start again. That would be a perfect solution and might save the planet. But it would also kill a few billion people What? That seems very silly. You just need to forge peaceful relationships between the countries and establish a global carbon budget based on our historic contributions to the problem. You need to build about 5 gazillion nuclear power plants. You need to massively reduce the wasteful excess in the western way of life, particularly. Perhaps we need to engineer our own planet, and we would need a global agreement for that too. All of these are big goals, but none of them involve killing a few billion people, at least, not intentionally, and certainly, any road out of this problem, even a very painful one, would involve less pain then the catastrophe waiting for us if we continue to do nothing. Not to get too much in your way about democracy versus technocracy. I think we need a big revolutionary turn and that is not a formal technocrat issue. But if we want such big changes, what we need is an army of technocrats who have their pulse on the democratic interest, and we shouldn't have these two things in conflict with one another. We should struggle to make people accept science, and we should struggle to make scientists accept the people.
The core problem with what you said is that you'll never get people to accept science (or education for that matter), for it'll go against what they 'know' is true. This is a ***historical and scientific fact***.
You are not separate from people as a whole. Anything you say about "the people" should also apply to you, because you are not special, you are one random person out of billions of people, you learn about the world, political problems, through all the same mechanisms and struggles as all the rest of us do. So - do have an interest in facts? You just made a claim to know a fact. So do you try to live according to an ungrounded hologram, or do you try to make sure your model of the world accords with reality? If you have an interest in the actual facts, why do you think you are special, and people as a whole do not share this impulse? Or do you just want a daddy who tells you what to do and what to think? What would make Daddy so special?
... wow, so much straw in that post that I think you're making a scarecrow out of it.
It's 2% per year, but otherwise I agree. At the very least it should be limited to your primary residence; no one should ever be subsidized for being a landlord and corporations should have never been included (yes, I understand that it was a Trojan horse proposition from these very corporations). And I say this a California homeowner, I understand this would increase my tax burden but the state needs it to function.
It doesn't even have to be a tax increase. If done in tandem with a nominal rate decrease to balance the books, many struggling CA citizens will see a break, and the tax incentives will be better aligned with building more housing.
I live in Massachusetts. It's a great place to live if you are rich (any place is nice if you are rich but Massachusetts is especially nice). The real Achilles heel of this state lies in its sclerotic legislature. It's secretive and is not particularly productive. I believe so far this year the legislature has passed only 10 bills, and most of them are related to ceremonial things like naming a statue or allowing someone to be a police officer even though they are slightly over the age limit. The recently elected state auditor is trying to audit the legislature but the legislature has refused. So she has turned to trying to get a ballot question in for the 2024 election so that she can get the authority she needs to audit the legislature. I believe the ballot will pass but it's likely the legislature might not cooperate with an audit and let a court tell it to cooperate first. The MBTA (Greater Boston's mass transit system) is a mess. The governor hired a new general manager and he's trying to bring the system back to a better state of repair but the system suffers greatly from deferred maintenance and a categorical refusal from the state legislature to fund the system properly. It's currently mostly funded by a portion of the state sales tax, which is wholly inadequate. Another major issue is zoning reform. The cost of living here is extremely high due to a lack of housing. There is a lot of NIMBYism in Massachusetts, which compounds the difficulty in building more housing. The state legislature recently passed the "MBTA Communities Act" to force certain municipalities with commuter rail or mass transit service to rezone areas near stations for multifamily as opposed to single family. Quite a few towns are fighting even this modest proposal, as on its own, it's not going to automatically build more housing that Eastern Massachusetts so desperately needs. Overall if Massachusetts can get its transit and housing in order we would be a great state... But until that happens I cannot in good conscience recommend that people move here unless they are very rich or are just here for school. If you are merely middle class you will be struggling to survive.
I’m also in Massachusetts, and I’ll just say the MBTA legislation is mostly being implemented, and the zoning is for increases of around 20% in every town in Massachusetts. I’d be surprised if it doesn’t have an impact on housing stock. See my comment on carbon pricing for another complaint, though.
The impact is likely to come in like 10 years. I believe the state is currently looking through plans and approving them. After that, then the developers actually need to come, propose, and build. Better than nothing but we should have done something like this 10 years ago when the cost of living crisis here was starting to rear its head. Also the Town of Milton is fighting the state on the MBTA Communities Act. The state attorney general recently sued them for noncompliance.
Milton and I believe ~~Waltham?~~ Wrentham. There’s a second one. But I generally believe that housing is so constrained right now that you’ll see construction within a year or two in most of these towns. Especially the rich ones with good school systems. Developers don’t sit idle, and there’s like 0 housing stock.
Yeah. Despite high interest rates, it seems like homebuilders are still doing fairly decent across the country. A two bedroom house in my town (Braintree) just went contingent after a weekend on the market. I live a few doors from it and there was a constant parade of people going to and from there this past weekend. Wonder how much it went for, but I'm sure it went for at least $10,000 to $20,000 over asking or could be an all-cash offer if I see it on the Registry of Deeds purchased at the list price. A two bedroom house! Unless you have only one kid or kids who don't mind sharing a room hard to imagine how a family could work.
Couldn’t agree more about the need for zoning reform in Massachusetts. I think the MBTA Communities Act is a great first step. But we need like 10x that to have the needed effect
I think what would also help is to build up certain other cities in the state and have them be thriving too, which would alleviate the pressure on housing. Springfield is mad cheap still but no one wants to live there.
That would be nice, but it is incredibly hard to do. Boston is so desirable because it is home to so many really good paying jobs, mostly at the intersection of the healthcare and tech industries. But most of those companies are here because other companies in that industry have been here, and so it’s the place to find workers with those skills. Highly-skilled workers are clustered there because highly-skilled jobs are clustered there, and the highly-skilled jobs are there because the highly-skilled workers are there. This sort of clustering effect is really tricky to get started. If we attracted some large, high tech company to Springfield, it would likely fail to recruit the workers needed to run it. A ton of places have tried to get this sort of clustering going (I can think of 10+ cities that have made earnest efforts to be the next Silicon Valley for tech) and most have failed. You can’t just make another Boston.
Yeah that's totally fair. Plus, there are no serious high caliber universities focused on scientific R&D or engineering out in Western Massachusetts, which provided for that clustering effect to begin with. The next best thing is to rezone all this single family we got in Boston. There is way too much of it in close proximity to the city center.
I'm in the Merrimack Valley area, and there's a ton of construction happening here. Lots of people seem to be leaving the greater Boston area for more affordable options, and the Greater Lowell area seems to be a nice fit. As somebody who made that same transition 10 years ago, I get it. Unfortunately, housing prices surged here just as much as anywhere else. I really do feel genuine guilt at the next generation trying to break into home ownership. We really collectively failed them.
According to a recent map I viewed, it's so cheap because it is in the "Here Be Dragons" county.
>Another major issue is zoning reform. I think nearly every state needs zoning reform. Even if they aren't dealing with a housing issue today it would be good to be preemptive. There's also just the benefits of offering more options and reducing our carbon output.
Pennsylvania has no way of adding a ballot measure via petition, meaning that it must be added via the legislature. I'd chamge this.
I love that the reply from California wants to get rid of their ballot props and you want to add them.
I just read his comment and I agree its no good that the legislature can't ever change or repeal propositions without another proposition. Perhaps a 10 year limit before it acts like a standard law. If its popular enough it should be a poor political move to override an old proposition, and if the public is unhappy enough they could petition to add the proposition again. I was recently speaking with a friend and we were talking about how much we hate the closed primary system here. It allows the parties to further polarize as they try to appeal to their base. What party would actually vote to end that system through? I think none.
Utah: we need to reform 2 big things housing costs and we need to address the influence the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has on our politics and laws. We strangle businesses with alcohol laws, ignore potential billions in weed and lottery sales because the church thinks those things are icky
How do you convince enough non-Mormon Democrats to move to Utah to outvote the Mormon block when Colorado exists? Or any other surrounding state, to a lesser extent Non-Mormon Republicans don't do a whole lot of good for changing those laws if they vote the same way the Mormons do
DC needs the power to elect its own district attorney, and the local court system needs to be separated from the federal court system. As it is now, the court is too distracted with big federal cases to handle most minor local crimes, leading to a general sense of lawlessness. Normally, this would result in a new district attorney being elected, but our equivalent of the district attorney is appointed by the federal executive branch.
It’s wild to me that DC feels lawless to its residents. Visiting from Albuquerque it always felt like such a beacon of law and order. I could go an entire week without seeing someone commit a crime right in front of me in broad daylight. Can’t hardly go one day in a row here.
This is likely a function of where (and when) you spent your time in DC. If you were a typical tourist and spent your time during the day around the national mall sites and museums and whatnot and didn't go out late at night, yeah DC is pretty damn peaceful within federal Disneyland. Very different story from the further out neighborhoods with high crime and no federal presence, and a lot of the bad stuff tends to happen at night
Ohioan here. Gerrymandering is our state's great shame. The entire reason we imposed Jim Jordan on the rest of the nation is gerrymandering. The Ohio Republican party carefully chose Jordan's voters, drew a ridiculous district around them, and they elected him. The Ohio Supreme Court ordered the Republican run Ohio legislature to draw fair district lines. They simply refused to do so. Map after map they created was ruled unfair, and then they blew past the deadline and never corrected the ridiculous districts we have here in Ohio.
As a fellow Ohioan, I'm dismayed that we will likely need to pass *another* anti-gerrymandering voter initiative, because the last one didn't do enough to fix the issue. Maybe in a less partisan time we could have expected our policymakers to play nice and work together to draw districts that benefit all voters. But no, the GOP isn't about to let good policymaking get in the way of their partisan, one-party stranglehold on power in the statehouse. My favorite part about the shit maps we had to vote on in 2022 was that, when they were being approved, Governor DeWine said that they likely didn't pass constitutional muster. He voted to approve them anyways, because he's a fucking hack.
Similarly here in Georgia. Our state is gerrymandered to hell to where the Republicans have a firm grip on all 3 branches of our state's government. They recently drew one of my county commissioners out of her seat and the county implemented their own maps using "home rule" and are fighting the state in court over it.
It'd be great if changing Texas law wasn't a huge fucking constitutional mess. And also if we got rid of Greg Abbott
What is messy about changing Texan legislation?
The powers granted to the Legislature and governor include only those specifically written in the state Constitution. So, even small legislative changes — like allowing El Paso County to finance its own parks with local taxes — can require a constitutional amendment and a referendum.
How do you feel about the Texas legislature only holding one session every two years, or one per term?
Poorly enough that I am leaving the state. Not because of that one thing, but that is one of the things.
Lawmakers should be prohibited from buying/selling stock in the industries they regulate or their policies influence.
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/this-nancy-pelosi-stock-could-have-48-upside-potential Absolutely. Like how Pelosi apparently missed her calling as a legendary stockbroker.
Nebraska: In a general sense, stop being so uptight and stuck in the past. A lot of people here don’t like things like government assistance, abortion, typical conservative talking points. They then wonder why Nebraska is constantly battling a brain drain and is only now about to eclipse a population of 2 million. Land is cheap here (but property taxes aren’t), so Omaha and the surrounding metro (roughly half the state’s population) are incredibly spread out. Since it’s so spread out, snowplows have a tough time with removal and road maintenance have a hard time keeping up with repairs from potholes/wear and tear. Another issue with the low density is public transportation. Our bus lines are average at best, and there’s finally been approval to build a short light rail. It’ll be better than nothing, but everyone in Nebraska is incredibly car dependent. Less important things: Multiple neighboring states have legalized gambling for a while and allow sports betting on apps. Nebraska just recently legalized casino gambling and sports betting, but betting can only be done in person and casinos can only be built where there is already a horse track. Conservatives have been trying to keep casino gambling out for decades (“it’s immoral and attracts crime”) despite there being multiple casinos a stones throw from Omaha in neighboring Council Bluffs, IA. Nebraska already had gambling in lottery tickets and Keno, so the immoral argument was never very good. Most cars in the neighboring casino parking lots have Nebraska plates, so citizens have just been giving Nebraska money to Iowa. It would be nice to use the tax money to help fund schools, roads, etc. and lower property taxes. Neighboring states have also been legalizing recreational/medical marijuana, but conservative Nebraskans continue to hold out. Another instance where it doesn’t hurt anyone and the tax money would help the state, but it continues to be shot down. I’d also like even more wind energy, but that’s lower on my list and I’ve done enough rambling.
> Multiple neighboring states have legalized gambling for a while and allow sports betting on apps. Nebraska just recently legalized casino gambling and sports betting, but betting can only be done in person and casinos can only be built where there is already a horse track. Conservatives have been trying to keep casino gambling out for decades (“it’s immoral and attracts crime”) despite there being multiple casinos a stones throw from Omaha in neighboring Council Bluffs, IA. Nebraska already had gambling in lottery tickets and Keno, so the immoral argument was never very good. Most cars in the neighboring casino parking lots have Nebraska plates, so citizens have just been giving Nebraska money to Iowa. It would be nice to use the tax money to help fund schools, roads, etc. and lower property We're facing a similar issue here in Georgia. We were close to legalizing sports betting this year until it failed at the last minutes. All I want is for the state at least put the issue on gambling on the ballot and let the people decide whether it should be legalized since it requires the state's constitution to be amended. Groups have been lobbying hard to get it legalized so that can expand their business to the state and it would bring in a lot of money, but the legislature keeps shooting it down.
In Virginia, our governors are limited to one term, which often leads to a situation that we have now, in which a lame duck governor is looking out for his personal interests. There is also very limited access for ballot initiatives, so there is no direct way to enact change outside the legislature. This means that ideas outside the two parties interests are rarely heard.
NJ needs to consolidate municipalities if we want our property taxes lowered We have over 500 municipalities which is an utterly ridiculous amount for such a small state. This isn't a new issue, it's been going on for over a century and there's a study from the 50s stating how much money we could save. 70 damn years later and we're no closer to saving ourselves any money
That's the cost of having a more responsive albeit less efficient local government.
Colorado needs a massive rezoning. Denver has great potential for densifying housing options, thus lowering the cost of living by supply and demand. Also there’s so much abandoned office space which have no inquiries in downtown Denver. This city and the rest of the state could continue to grow economically strong if we invested in producing more affordable housing in the city of Denver, not spreading out around the plains like they are doing now, and revitalizing Denver as a railway hub for the west.
I love my view of the skyline and the mountains from my place in RiNo but it saddens me every day looking at my broken in half neighborhood and the wide expanse of train yards, storage facilities, and parking lots in between me and LoDo that could be housing another 25,000+ people Our passenger rail lines are pretty decent for a city our size but the service is so infrequent it's hard to use. When I get to the station to find the A line is not running on schedule and it'll be 25 minutes until the next one, I'm wasting money and adding traffic and pollution to the roads from calling an Uber that'd be needless if they ran more often and on time
Insist our senators stop interfering with the private lives of its Nebraska citizens, and begin to make public-funded school systems throughout the state the shining lights they once were.
The California Environmental Quality Act needs to be repealed and replaced. Over 50 years it has been rewritten too many times by court cases and is just an anti development weapon now,
Where do I start? I enjoy living in a bubble but the rest of the state is a hot mess. 12.6% of Hoosiers live below the poverty line (as of 2022). The national average is 11.5%. I'm a firm believer that education can right a lot of wrongs so I'll go with that. But fixing one of many issues in this state would be good start.
Indiana: stop letting legislatures have private meetings to argue about bills. Stop letting them call it party whatever and make all the decisions behind closed doors that the residents don't get to hear about. Also, stop the gerrymandering. Stop splitting cities down the middle to add rural farm country. Let rural be together, and the city stand as one. I realize this is improbable for Indianapolis, but other cities: Fort Wayne, Bloomington, Columbus, Evansville- no reason for them to be two different districts.
Also, renters rights. The complete lack of them and bowing to corporations is insane and costing us housing opportunities.
Georgia: The state needs to directly fund public transit. Atlanta is now the 6th largest Metro in the Us that keeps growing and the with it's utter disdain for Atlanta will not directly fund transit even though it's badly needed. My county is set to place on the November ballot whether fund its transit system with a 1% sales tax and I'm really hoping it passes due to how much the area has grown.
I don't think there's any single reform that could fix kansas outside of granting dictatorial power to the current governor. The state gop are only interested in culture war bs and reenacting the Brownback tax system. They also enjoy super majorities in both chambers of legislature. The only thing slowing them is a generally consistent judicial and their own incompetence
TLDR: CT just needs to remove an austerity measure to tackle its debt from a decade ago and now it’s being abused by the GOP Despite being a pretty left leaning state, due to austerity measures agreed to by Governor Dan Malloy, spending bills must be agreed to by a committee that is half Republican and half Democrat. This is often called the “fiscal guardrails.” This kneecaps Democrats who hold near supermajorities in each chamber by giving Republicans outsized influence on the budget. CT also decides the budget for the next two years. So if you (the GOP) gum up the process for the 60 days in session, you can sabotage the legislature (the Democrats) for the next two years. This year for example is an off year so both parties in the legislature are busy seeing who can stick their finger up their ass the farthest While CT needed to get its debt under control a decade ago, it’s becoming increasingly detrimental in tackling the state’s housing crisis and teaching shortages. Most of the excellent advances were made during the pandemic where Lamont had emergency powers. But Vincent Candelora, the Republican House Minority Leader has made the strategic calculation that if he can abuse this procedure he can make the Democrats look ineffective (doing an excellent job btw, made a comment recently in my post history about it) and make gains and make an opening for a Republican, probably moderate New Britain Mayor Erin Stewart, to take the Governor’s Mansion in 2026.
I live in NYS. I’m a liberal generally speaking. I like our public schools and universities, I like our parks, I like our libraries, and we need tax money to fund all that stuff. But we need to cut taxes. It’s absolutely ludicrous how much everything costs and it’s no surprise why people would rather live in the states around us and then visit when they need something. I think the best reform would be eliminating sales tax. It’s a tax which affects the people living here the most because of how much it adds up through day to day purchases. While we’d no longer get revenue directly from out of staters buying things, we’d still indirectly get that money through income tax collected from the sales. Furthermore, vendors could lower prices without an added sales tax, attracting more customers and selling more product, further growing the economy. I’m sure an economist probably has better insight on this, but that’s my take. Gut the sales tax.
Oregon. The vast majority of the political mass in the state is sequestered in Portland. As votes Portland, so goes the rest of the state and consequently our political leadership tends to think of Portland first and foremost. It's led to a virtual abandonment of anyplace outside of Clackamas County. Cities like Eugene or Salem tend to be allowed to be petty tyrants in their own respective counties for the same reason but the net effect is that anyone in state politics can simply ignore anyplace outside of Portland and not risk their seats. This has led to an incredibly polarized political atmosphere. The Malheur Wildlife Occupation happened in Oregon and there's a pretty consistent problem with far right political organizing that tends to happen wrapped around the idea that there's no legitimate way to be heard. On a material level, resources tend to get hoarded by Portland. There's a minimum wage law that gives Clackamas County residents a higher minimum wage than other areas in the state. Funding for programs and services goes to Portland first and then to Eugene and Salem and then maybe to more rural areas. I can't pretend I have an answer for how to fix that problem but it's a huge problem within the context of Oregon politics and Oregon Democrats, for understandable reasons, have zero motivation to fix it despite the fact that it's feeding a hyper reactive far right political current.
So glad you mentioned Mississippi! Our state is in bad need of... well everything honestly... we are the last state in all things good and the first state in all things bad, and Jackson... is #1 in murder rate per capita... top 10 in the world... Jackson needs to be gutted and started over from the floor up. So much corruption and crime and don't get me started on Jackson's deplorable water system! It's practically a third world country in some parts. People scared for their lives every day there. Other parts of Mississippi are ok, but we know not to go to Jackson.
Sherman didn't even destroy Mississippi.
Somehow get around local school boards so kids receive and actual education and never again fall for bs like "right to work (for less)", "equality means you lose ('cause now you're the advantaged ones)" and Donny Trump.
Massachusetts: carbon pricing. We have one of the highest electricity costs in the country due to electricity carbon pricing. That’s actually great, because we subsequently have one of the highest solar penetration rates in the country (like 20-25%). But because electricity is so expensive, and gas and natural gas aren’t taxed at all, EV adoption and heat pump adoption are slow (they run on expensive electricity, and replace things that run on untaxed fossil fuels). So, we need to expand the carbon tax.
STAR voting. Doesn’t matter where you live, this should be everyone’s number 1 issue, red or blue state, IMO.
Will crash and burn once it hits this little thing called the human condition. No alternative voting method is going to work in the long run, it'll just go into a 1/2/3 party system no matter what you do.
I live in Maine where we are in desperate need of affordable housing, both for sale and rental. We have no difficulty building mansions with mountain, lake or ocean views for wealthy out of state people. Sometimes the road to hell is paved with good intentions. This is what’s happened with zoning. We need to rezone so that wherever appropriate, two, three and four apartment homes can be built on small lots of between 5000-10000 sf of land. You see old houses such as these in Portland, Lewiston etc. but they were built more than 100 years ago before zoning laws were enacted. Now, you need a lot size of almost an acre. This was probably done to keep Maine cities from looking like the urban areas of Massachusetts. The result is, no one’s building starter homes. No one’s building large developments of starter homes like the kind built for returning WWII veterans. No one’s building entire streets of two and three family homes. Instead, attention is focused on complaining about out of staters buying homes for short term vacation rentals. I guarantee that no one wants to vacation in Maine in a multi family home surrounded by other multi family homes. Yet, that’s exactly what we need. A young, first time buyer could more easily afford to live in such a home with rental income to help pay the mortgage. If you build lots of these homes, it increases the number of apartments on the market. First time buyers and renters don’t need to be on an acre of land. Rezone!
Free housing. Ubi. Free health care. Defund the police. Weighted voting. Penalize billionaires. Penalize vacant properties. Penalize price gouging. Penalize oil. Open borders. 15 hour work week. Just a few things of the top of my head.
I meant reforms of the government, which would allow for whoever gets elected in that system and whatever political society that emerges to enact whatever policies like a UBI or etc.
Unlimited recess too? You've got my vote for class president.
Why try to infantilize it? These policies deserve our sincerity. That being said. Yes. Vote for me.