Forum Post: MY specific demands
Posted 12 years ago on Jan. 8, 2012, 3:15 a.m. EST by sato
(148)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Not in any specific order.
A- Cut the amount of money candidates can receive for their political races. End SuperPACs. End lobbying. Public elections should receive public funding and that's it. We don't need a billion ads on TV to know who not to vote for. We want politicians that work for the greater good of the country, not the greater good of corporations.
B- Repeal NDAA and reject SOPA. These bills undermine our freedom.
C- Regulate education costs. Make performance the selection method for schools rather than money. Learn from countries like Finland where even higher education is free of tuition. Bailout our graduate students, not the corporations. Enforce measures to reduce education costs. For example promote use of open source material like Open Courseware and Khan Academy instead of expensive copyrighted books.
D- Put training responsibility on the employer. Create entry level jobs with no experience required and require employers to post entry level jobs at any given interval of time you decide. Heck, I have a degree but I don't have experience because no one employs me. No one employs me because I have no experience. End this cycle! This may even benefit older people looking for a new trade. This measure could be subsidized too.
E- End the Bush tax cuts and loopholes. Consider a household net worth instead of their salary. Steve Jobs earned only a dollar. Raise taxes for the richer people. I propose steps. Steps would define what's fair and it would be fair for everyone. (This needs proper balancing, I'm just putting variables and some numbers to illustrate my example. The steps would need to be defined by someone who knows numbers.) X is the base tax. Y and Z are the increases for each step.
The first 50k earned, pays x%. <--- Taxpayer earns up to 50k. This is the base tax that everyone pays.
The next 50k pays x+y% <--- Taxpayer earns up to 100k
The next 100k pays x+z% <--- Taxpayer earns up to 200k
And so on. Everyone would pay the base step of x% but only the richer people would pay further steps.
Assume someone who earns 192k. This person would pay:
x% for the first 50k.
x +y% for the next 50k.
x +z% for last 92k.
F- Pass legislation to allow recent grads and people that were employed and are suddenly unemployed to get a preferential loan rate. I think someone that has worked for a year is good enough. After this year, if suddenly this person is laid off, the banks must lower their loan rates. This will protect people from losing their credit, houses, cars you name it.
G- End government aids to people that are willingly not working. I say stop giving welfare checks unless the person can prove to be applying for jobs or to be truly unable to get a job because of a medical condition or age. End the bloody leeching. Increase use of internet job postings and make these persons use this services to be eligible for any aid.
H- Create the means to end bipartisan disputes. Our country is bigger than any political party. Our credit was degraded because a few politicians couldn't compromise and put our country ahead. We need the means to end this.
I- Add tariffs to American businesses overseas. Bring the jobs back home. Pass measures to reduce outsourcing to China and India or any other country.
UNITED WE STAND, DIVIDED WE FALL. I live in the United States of America. This is supposed to be the land of opportunities. The land of the free. The best country in the world. Let's make this happen! Everyone should have the right to get a job and pay their due taxes. That's what we should aspire to; to create that environment.
If you agree or disagree, comment. If you have your own demands, I'd like to read about them.
A lot of people who contribute to this site have all kinds of plans, good, bad and indifferent. What is universally the case is not a single one of them has any plan regarding how to implement their plan and they are for the most part absolutely clueless about the decision making processes of OWS. As such, no matter how rational their plans they are not at all serious, but rather nothing more but arm chair kibbitzers,
Well I said MY as to MY not specifically OWS. As everything with OWS you need to throw ideas and hope to get traction. My intention was to test waters, discuss and work MY ideas before I try to push them to OWS in general.
Throw ideas out and hope they get traction? What does that mean? As far as I can figure out it means that you are leaving it up to someone else to figure out how to get your ideas implemented, which does not strike me as particularly responsible, honorable, serious, practical or realistic.
it means that you can: discuss this ideas,criticize give your opinion, add your own, agree and disagree etc etc
if somehow out the discussion there are ideas people can agree with (after being discussed, polished etc) then I would try to push them to bigger groups to try to get people in the movement to agree and eventually get action from it. Nothing irresponsible in my opinion. I'm just discussing matters that affect us all to try to find a solution people can agree to. The worse that could happen is that we find a solution.
Since all that (discussion, criticism, revisions, amendments, etc.) takes place in the process of implementation, to refrain from discussing implementation as the part of any proposal shows an utter lack of seriousness or understanding of the decision making process.
G- End government aids to people that are willingly not working. I say stop giving welfare checks unless the person can prove to be applying for jobs or to be truly unable to get a job because of a medical condition or age. End the bloody leeching. Increase use of internet job postings and make these persons use this services to be eligible for any aid.
This is already policy.
No demands without an ultimatum!
[Removed]
A- Disagree. Don't see any reason to waste public money on elections.
B- Agree.
C- Agreed. And it already is. You need to perform well academically and score well in your SAT and GRE etc to get into a good school.
D- Disagree. Employers cannot indefinitely create low end jobs. Also it's hard to define low end. In a consulting firm a low end job would still require a good degree (preferably MBA) and stellar acads.
E- Would that be fair? Say x and y are 20% and 20% respectively. So the guy earning $50k pays $10k as tax and the guy earning $100k would pay $40k as taxes. That's unfair don't you think. It's like penalizing someone for being more getting a better education, working smarter and harder and being successful.
F- Disagree. One of the reasons for the financial crisis was the fact that Alan Greenspan kept interest rates really low, it lead to cheaper loans to sub prime borrowers who were then unable to pay it back. Extending cheaper loans to the unemployed will cause the same thing again. If someone gets laid off that person needs to adjust his life style and not expect the whole economy to adjust to suit him.
G- Agreed.
H- Agreed. Warren Buffet suggested something to this end
I- Disagree. In today's globalized world corporations transcend state boundaries. Besides, if a Ford or GM were to manufacture all it''s cars in US, the cost would be so high that these cars would become noncompetitive in the global market and the company would have to shut shop. In the short run such a measure will bring back jobs but in the long run, all the jobs will be lost because the company would simply cease to exist.
"""A- Disagree. Don't see any reason to waste public money on elections. ""
Corporations could give money to suport democratic not to suport especifs things . So it will be more democratic to avoid corporations sending money to politics. It wont be a big "waste" , you just need some advertisment, and some videos uploaded at youtube. That money anyways is already "waste" by corporations, so it can taxed, to give money to future politicians. Many countrys has this model of free speech spaces on TV ,RADIO, Newspaper pay equal payed by goverment .
There is much more to an election that 'advertisements and youtube videos'
A- public schools are public funded. Public politicians shouldn't be privately funded and bought by corporations.
C- You also have to pay huge tuition costs to enter. My point in countries like Finland where education is top notch, no one is barred because they don't even have tuition fees at all.
D- This is where subsidies kick in. I know a lot of people are on my dilemma of no exp, no job and no job, no exp. Call it basic training with government subsidies. This measure would jumpstart careers. Given interval can be months or years.
E- You misunderstood me. x is the base tax. y and z are the increases. I ll clear that out in the original post. So say base is 7%, then x = 7. y can be anything from 0.2 to whatever. Same with z. Everyone pays the same for earning the first step but the richer people pay more steps. In this sense, it is a fair system.
Assume x = 7 and y = 1.
A guy earning 50k pays 3500.
A guy earning 100k pays 3500 for the first 50k and 4000 for the next 50k. For a total paid of 7500 for 100k.
A guy that earns more pays more but pays the same amount over the common steps. The system doesn't penalize success. The system takes into account that: first, the purpose of tax is revenue and second a guy with more money has more resources.
F- The problem Im trying to tackle is home foreclosures. Assume a guy worked hard and paid on time every single time. Lay offs are pretty common so his company sends him home. How do you plan to tackle this problem? It's not his fault after all.
I- While you are concerned over being competitive on other countries Im concerned keeping our own economy strong. Keeping Americans employed means the people have more power to buy. If the economy is strong, we have the funds to create subsidies.
If still unconvinced, feel free to discuss further.
A - I understand the problem you are trying to solve. But the solution would never be accepted. People would never accept to public money getting spent on political campaigns. Instead, it would be far easier for say OWS protesters to form an union and fund a particular campaign.
B- Finland's education is not all that 'top notch'? How many Nobel prize winners are Finnish? How many patents are being filed by Finnish people? How many students choose to go to Finland over US? Yes they have 100% literacy but the education is certainly not 'top notch'. Tution is to be paid to get good teachers.If you don't want to pay a lot, you can go to public schools and community colleges. How many Finnish universities are in the world 100 rankings?
E- Ohk, so in my 20% and 20% case, the guy earning $50k pays $10k and taxes while the guy earning $100k pays $30k. Fine? The point is the rich already pay a majority of the tax collected, despite all the loop holes. Now you want a tax structure where the rich should pay higher taxes, not just in absolute terms but also in percentage terms. Again, seems unfair. You are suggesting this only because you are not a high earner. You want to tax others more.
In fact the rich could even argue that they should pay less percentage tax. After all, they don't avail many of the welfare and social security schemes of the government. So in effect they are already subsidizing the costs of those schemes for the lower wage earners. Why pay even more? The guy who earns $1 million has much right to his earnings as the guy earning $30k.
F- Lay offs are not all that common. Unemployment has fallen recently to a 3 year low. And it is not the government fault either that he/she got laid off. For one, a out of work guy will start availing food stamps etc. Now you want to add a subsidized house on top of that?
I- I am simply concerned about the survival of our companies. if our companies cannot export they would cease to exist, so whatever people they were employing would also be unemployed. Our GDP would fall because we our exports fell, to the deficit increases even more. We will default on our sovereign debt and the whole country will be screwed because hey we wanted to protect a few outdated jobs. You simply cannot will against market forces. Today, we are facing this problem. In some years China and India too will face the same problems because their wages are rising. These jobs will then go to other Asian and African countries. It's a given. You cannot stop it.
A- If the people pay the candidates a set amount, say 1M and we limit the candidates to that 1M and no external funds, corruption would be limited. Candidates need support of the population anyway so at least a specific number of people does support each candidate or they wouldn't be able to pursue a position anyway.
B- University of Helsinki, University of Oulu, University of Eastern Finland, University of Jyväskylä, University of Tampere. I searched for this. Don't ask me about any of them. Personally, I know Aalto is very advanced for my field and since it's free I have considered applying. Don't just base education on how many awards an univ has. Base your judgement on their ability to put students on the job which I consider to be the purpose of education. Also, on the plus side, and my point, they graduate students without debt.
E- If someone has 100k and pays 7500, that someone still has 92500 to live their lives. If someone has 50k and pays 3500, that someone has 46500 which is still less than the richest person. The rich can argue all they want but the majority of the country isn't rich and is doing much worse. When the people at the bottom of the economy does better everyone does better.
F- What I mean is that we make legislation so banks take it easier on someone whose situation has been recently changed. If you asked your friend for money and you got fired the next week, you would negotiate with him. I'm saying we make banks treat the people with that same respect a friend would. If anything just waiver debts a few months while the person gets back on track. I still want the person to be responsible and get a job, but that may take a while. I don't suggest subsidies for this. Link related http://news.yahoo.com/clinton-housing-key-fixing-nations-economy-030222909.html
I- Our companies will do just fine. The money that they earn overseas stays overseas feeding foreign economies. These companies are facing foreign economy crises like the fall of the euro and all that sort of thing anyway. We need to bring those jobs back home. If they can move to Asia and African countries why not move back home and strengthen our own economy. One day, the whole world will have a minimum wage. Where will companies move operations to when that day comes. This could be negotiated with corporate tax breaks too.
A- 1M is too meager to fund a campaign. sorry. B- How many of those are in the top 100? And btw, Finland has an unemployment rate of 7%. Not all that awesome, is it? E- Dude, there already are tax slabs. Check the IRS website. F- Buying a house doesn't make you get back on track. Sure, the bank can extend a moratorium on payments for some time. May be. I- They won't. If you understood an iota of economics or the cost structure you would not be saying this. I am sorry but you are completely off the mark. You saying so does not change the market. The jobs will go to countries where there is cheap low skilled labor. Every country goes through this cycle where it first does low skilled work and gradually moves up the value chain, it has to. May be one day all the world with come to a state of wage parity, but you and I will certainly not survive to see that day.
E - What about a flat tax. When you buy electronics at Best Buy, you are taxed a percentage, not a tax based on the price.
What is the dollar figure of every dollar earned by every american? How much money does the US need to operate?
There is your percentage.
That's a sales tax. Income tax is the major revenue source of the IRS. You can't put both taxes on the same scale. One is the main source, the other is a support tax if you could say that.
And I hope you do know that there already are tax slabs for varying level of income. Why need more tinkering?
I know that, but it works with the whole income instead of a part. The current system makes the rich pay a heavier tax over the same amount of money. What I'm proposing means that everyone pays the same for each level. If a rich person is on a higher level, they pay a new level. But for the first 50k, everyone pays the same base tax and for every common level, everyone pays the same tax rate.