ideas posts page 5

the government pays the salary. Everyone recieves a salary from the government based from some determined number, perhaps $20,000 a year. This is everybody: every man, woman, and child. This base pay is modified up or down individually depending on what each person does.
-Children’s pay would be based upon their school attendance and grades. A C average grade with a decent attendance record would get the $20k. B and A average students would get more money. D and F students, and those with bad attendance records, would get less. The system would probably look at other factors as well.
-For employees, they would either need to achieve 40 hours a week to get the base $20k, or their productivity (perhaps based on a calculated independant contribution to GDP or something like that) level would determine their pay level, with some range of normal and acceptable outputs achieving the $20k base level.
-The level should not normally vary by more than perhaps +/- 50%.
-inventiveness and other such traits would reap monetary benefit. Inventors and discoverors would recieve short term spikes in thier salary based on contribition of the invention or discovery to society as a whole and their individual contribution to the project.
-Money given to children would start when they are born being split between money saved for education and their expected costs of living and small toy costs, which would be given to the parents. The money would slowly, as the children age, be given more and more directly to them.
-Other incentives and disincentives would also modify the base salary, in a similar way that they do on income tax returns now. For instance, purchase of energy efficient modifications to homes might increase salary. The children based incentives would not exist since the children make their own guarenteed money.
-There would no longer be an income tax, except on any moneys gained through other means than from the government. All government moneys would be raised from other areas.

-Businesses would pay the government employment taxes, which would provide the moneys for everyones salaries. These would probably be based on the number of employees, company productivity and/or contribution to society, and profitability, and be modified by incentives and discincentives similar to the salaries. The taxes should start out equaling approximately what companies are paying currently in wages and salaries to employees, and eventually take more and more into account the above paramaters.

-many of the non-wage or salary bearing money making methods should probably still be in existance. Entreprenuers could still start businesses and recieve profits for their effort and money invested. Money invested in stocks, bonds, or bank accounts could still earn people interest on their money and finance companies and individuals. People could still take out loans. These oppurtunities would provide the market based incentives available today. The government could possibly emulate these incentives and financial services, but probably wouldn’t be as effective.

everyone (that means everyone) makes similar wages, perhaps $10 – 20 an hour base.

-This base pay is determined by the desirability of the job to society: higher pay provides greater incentive to work the jobs. It may also be higher for more dangerous or damaging jobs, to provide for the possible medical bills or funeral expenses. Starting workers and easy no skill workers would get the lower end pay.

-This base may be modified on a person to person basis by up plus or minus 50% based on the worker’s productivity at their job. This would provide a maximum of $30 an hour in my example range for very productive workers doing those jobs most desireable to society. It may need to be watched or held to a curve of some sort to ensure companies aren’t giving the positive or negative bonuses as if they were the base pay.

-Number of hours are chosen by the worker exactly, with no overtime available. Workers so decide how much free time they have and how much money they make.

-Workers should generally be working two or more jobs. They’d work in both a low and a high profit industry (or what would currently be low and high wage jobs) and the companies would split the cost put toward the wages based on their profitability. This would ensure that companies that don’t bring in much money could still afford their labor, while highly profitable companies bringing in lots would not be raking in excessive money. For employees, this would provide a more diversified work-life and the chance to get some excersise from work even if their primary job provides none.

-The job splitting and setting-up could all be handled by a government agency to handle the splitting of hours worked by the employee and wages payed by the employers. It would be made easy to change jobs.

A list of all potential budget items is made. Individuals then choose what percantage of their income taxes goes into each listed program. Referendums and elected officials choose what programs are on the list. Low funding marks programs for removal, either by elected officials or a vote. The list is filed annually with the tax return. A change form could be used midyear.

Several different versions of each program could possibly be used, allowing voters to choose the one more accurately affecting their desires for the program. This would also allow programs that do not meet their goals to be repremanded by voters by having their budget reduced, but would split the divide money and effort towards a common or similar goal.

Advantages
This would link the resources held by each program to the voters desires for them to succeed.

Voters put their money where they want it. They see and have a better understanding of where this money is going. Confidence in the budget should increase, hopefully with less feelings of government waste.

Programs known to be wasting money will be repremanded by the public through reducal of budgets.

Disadvantages
Voters may not be good with budgeting, and will likely do a poor job of reasonably spreading funds through all programs. They will likely give certain favored programs all the money while giving others none. This may even out somewhat throughout the entire voting populace, but likely not enough, especially when certain programs are hot for debate while others are not. Alternatively, voters may vote to increase or decrease funding for different programs by varying amounts. This could become rather complex, especially if the voters must adhere to a given funding level. If they don’t, then their changes could increase or decrease taxes, giving voters direct control over this. To simplify things, ratings for each program might be done like the NPAT system, going from greatly increase to greatly decrease, perhaps numbered in counting +3 to -3. A composite of all these would then be taken and the average vote would be taken. Guidelines would need to be established for what each choice means in execution.

Some programs would likely be subject to a lot of negative feedback in the media, which wouldn’t neccisarily be well deserved. Programs doing well to achieve their goals may lose major budgeting or even be killed because of a bad incident or string of incidents that gets the public angry with them. Without the system like above with multiple options available, an entire area of government may be killed, with nothing to replace it. If, for instance, the military was seen poorly in the public eye because of a war or series of other incidents, the country may end up with no military all of a sudden. This would be alleviated somewhat by the funding modification system of above.

Programs would want to spend a lot of money on advertising, to raise public awareness in their favor, especially when a negative story is run on them in the media. If there are competing programs, a lot of mudslinging might occur. This may have to be strictly limited, or perhaps even all adverstising funding eliminated, by legislation. There could be a governemnt program, even a seperate branch of government, created to independantly inform voter about all programs.

allow voters to vote for multiple candidates in each race. Each vote would be counted and added to the tally of each candidate as it is now. Percentages would likely be drawn from the total number of tallies, but could potentially still be considered by percentage of population.

One could then vote for an independant party that closely matches their interests while still being able to put a vote in for the candidate of the major party they would prefer to win, allowing them to not “throw their vote away”. This would give the other parties much greater success, and perhaps eventually give them some power.

voters take something like the NPAT test, a test covering all the major issues up for current debate. The results will all be added together to get an NPAT for the entire nation, and seperately for each subdivision of the nation that is having an election. Each item would be shown as a percentage of the population in agreement with that item. These results would be compared to each the NPAT of each candidate from each division, and the candidate statistically closer to the division NPAT would be elected.

Some Advantages:
This would allow (theoretically) the most appropriate candidate to be chosen by each citizen without each citizen having to wade through the mud slung by each candidate at the other.

One would simultaneously be voting for every candidate close to their personal opinion set, while voting against every candidate opposing their opinion set. In such a way, the problem of limited selection from a two party system would be eliminated, as one could vote third party as well as for their major party at the same time, and even for multiple candidates from their party at the same time.

Some problems:
As politicians already can and do lie about their positions on given issues, it would be unreasonable to expect them to stop now. Especially when their vote is much more directly tied to those positions.

There will be no mechanism to punish candidates for failing to follow through on their declarations made in the NPAT, making the above problem very bad. Some system for this would be needed. Perhaps they could be challenged by a large group of citizens if they fail to meet these positions, and have an independant panel of judges decide if they indeed failed. The group size would have to be set large enough that this wouldn’t be happening constantly, particularly by those who voted opposite the officer. Or perhaps an independant body would repeatedly, perhaps monthly, rate the officer based on their performance on each issue, and the officer would be removed from office or a new race would be ran if a certain threshold is passed in difference between performance and original declaration. This body could potentially be a randomly chosen selection of citizenry, or even the entire nation. This would perhaps create problems if major events change the environment the officer is acting in.

people want/have preferences for certain things
government could be used to attempt to provide these wants
as in communism goods, jobs, and property are owned by all and managed by government, and these are important areas where people have personal preferences, they could be doled out to those who want them
jobs: person educated generally at first, makes choices as education progresses that narrows them closer and closer to a field they are interested in. they may change directions if they don’t like where they are going, and work towards multiple areas of interest. government, through good planning, knows what jobs are generally needed, and decides how many openings there are in a given field. after education, person either takes opening in chosen field, or is put on wait for opening and works in another area of interest until an opening occurs to their liking. supply affected by demand to some degree: government changes number of positions toward fields people want, or provide other incentives in unwanted fields. person tires of job, can take opening or wait for another field.
homes: people have many ideas of ideal home and location to live. government creates homes where people want to live. can only create so many homes in given place. if can’t get desired location, can be put in closest (based on desirable criteria rather than geographical proximity) available accomodations, put on waiting list till home becomes available. various styles of living accomodations will be made in each area based on demand for each type. all homes will still be designed pragmatically, with items such as energy efficiency and usage efficiency being important considerations. all houses upgraded as technology becomes available, considering benifits for the costs involved.
solitary versus group, quiet versus noise filled, rural vs urban

this would be most applicable for smaller governing bodies, such as a congress/parlaiment. It takes into consideration the common US voting method for juries of murder trials. The outcome of these votes is considered rather important, so a strict consensus vote is required. All members must vote for or against a guilty verdict. Multiple votes must be taken until all members make the same choice. Members must try to convince others to vote with them, making the voting procedure rather active.

I think a similar strict system should be in place for the more important votes on legislation. The most important decisions, perhaps ammending the constitution, would require the jury method of all or none. Run of the mill decisions that change very little would require a standard >50% majority. Other votes would be somewhere in between, based on how drastic the change would be. Many of the more important decisions might require something like a 75 – 25 percent split; >75% yeah to pass, <25% yeah to fail. If the proper consensus was not met, deliberation would continue for a while, then another vote would be taken, continuing until a yeah or nay consensus was reached. This would ensure a more agreed upon decision, and render a simple majority of seats less powerful.

Lots of ‘deals’ would undoubtedly be made to ensure minority support of majority bills, but this is already a noteable problem. There would need to be strict rules in place to decide which sort of bills deserve which sort of split, to ensure a ruling party would not be as able to simply vote all votes on a 50% split.

At the very least, many more votes should be required to achieve a 60 or 75% consensus. Amendmants should require even greater consensus, due to the extreme power they weild.

After noticing how much time I spend doing things like cooking and washing dished, I’d somewhat like to live in a commune, a group of people providing members needs efficiently. Everyone would likely live in an efficiently designed apartment like building.

People would be free to leave at anytime, join (back) in any time space is available. They may also move to other communes around the country/world anytime space is available.

In its simplest form, this would merely be a large shared living quarters. Each person would have their own private room for a bed, personal possesions, etc.
-Bathrooms could be in each room or, to be much more efficient, on each floor. They would be much more private than standard public restrooms, with rooms for each facility. Bathing rooms would be seperate from toilet rooms.
-There would be a large restaurant type kitchen servicing the whole place. Food would be purchased as used from the full-sized store of regular goods. Any irregular goods could be specially ordered and made regular if needed. The amounts being ordered would be closely monitored to ensure nothing runs out while nothing spoils.
-Community spaces would be provided for playing sports and table-games, watching tv and movies and playing video games, conversing, and other such liesure activities.
-Many commonly used items would be purchased by the entire community for their benifit. The proper amounts for the demand would be monitored. Tools for automotive work and carpentry would be available, with a garage and workshop. Cards, board games, some sporting equipment, tvs, and furniture would be purchased for the community areas. Some cleaning implements, such as vacuums, mops, and brooms would be available for use.

Cooks, dishwashers, and community area maids may be wanted to be payed for by community members to provide their services and allow others to concentrate more fully on their own lines of work. Cooks would cook to order some meals or take orders in advance to allow for better planning. Or a more 24-hour cafeteria like approach could be used, where choices of meals would be available, plus a set selection of items always there. These personnel would be paid by the system, either not bringing in money from the outside at all, or working short enough hours to still allow an outside job.

In a much more involved commune, in which many more of the needs of the community would be provided ‘in-house’, the less specialised jobs would be shared among a lot of people: cook one meal, dishwash for a bit, work on committee for calculating how much food should be ordered next for a bit. This would ensure no-one is forced into doing undesirable jobs all the time.

This article is incomplete.