Right now, in the United States of America, there are several issues that demand our attention as a nation. However, there are a few core issues that I believe must be explored in greater detail. This is because the debate these issues have created has brought to light the understanding and nuance about positions we need to support.
There are ways we could come together with everyone to make a compromise that would be useful to improve our quality of life and, in turn, save the country in the long run.
Immigration policies
It is no surprise that immigration policies and reform are major topics being debated almost daily on the news and in private conversations.
However, I believe that it’s essential to have a comprehensive immigration policy that is based on small affordable communities on the border waiting for their turn to be potentially permitted to enter the country.
There needs to be a new, decisive limit of potential immigrants allowed annually declared to the world to disillusion other countries from believing they have a chance to enter the U.S. illegally. This is because now, we will offer ample opportunities for legal entry and refuge to those who need it. This also means we can be morally entitled to give much greater enforcement and surveillance to illegal entry.
A clear immigration policy like this can also help us reduce the exploitation of undocumented and illegal immigrants by severely penalizing companies that do this. In the interim, those wishing to enter and seek refuge in America will be contained in a secured boundary in several communities with economically sensible and dignified structures to live in.
This will almost certainly be using modular housing. The aspiring immigrants will work by contributing to the country through being trained and providing services like regenerative agriculture and clean energy and be provided free room and board. This will result in the healthiest food and energy that America needs and also allow for a combination that the government will decide — how much of this produce will go for significant profit and how much to serve the poor through food banks.
Like every other citizen and resident who works for the country and contributes in their way, immigrants in these communities can also work and showcase their contribution to America.
They will be evaluated by administrative staff and other aspiring immigrants on their performance and attitudes. This is perhaps the only way we will be able to improve the quality and security when it comes to knowing who is to be allowed in our country. There are tremendous advantages to seeing individuals working together and being able to sense their attitudes, private conversations, and their work ethic. In essence, this will give us the only way to have extra evaluative tools to separate the safe contributors from those that will present potential danger. We’ve previously discussed this extensively in our article exploring immigration reform if you’d like to read further.
Abortion rights
Given the recent overturn of Roe v Wade, abortion rights are another core issue affecting Americans today. The goal is to find a middle ground that could be tolerable to both sides of the table — for example, three months of pregnancy being the time limit to allow women the right to choose but also have respect for life as none of us, in truth, can really know when life begins.
Of course, there would need to be nuances considered for sexual assault, rape, or incest with greater flexibility in time, but again there needs to be a compromise from both sides. It may be that there would be sufficient time, e.g., an additional month, allowed to allow the traumatized victim in such situations to work through their psychological trauma and still again consider the unknown realm of when life begins.
Also, severe situations of hardship through poverty, compounded by single parenting, would need to be explored. This would sensibly be in concert with adoption agencies, perhaps mandated at that point. The central theme of the compromise isn’t to come up with the majority of the answers but to address the questions that would need to be entertained to support an intelligent compromise by all parties.
It will take the humility of neither side playing the role of god (as if any of us really know when life begins for sure) and still respecting women’s right to have a choice and be responsible to lessen the chance of creating harm to both to the infant and keeping a national fight in a dangerous intractable position.
In this limited period, the laws would allow abortion, but after that, the solution could be to expand the social services to provide adoption and foster care for anyone unable to take care of the child. Even though both sides will likely want to fight with this idea, the country will have healed one of the most divisive and dangerous issues facing it. All of us need to do our best to compromise for the benefit of the country..
Human rights don’t begin and end at abortion and birth, so to take care of the child, there would be numerous new social programs and regulations around education, health, etc.
Taxation
Throughout the millennia, there has been a consistent theme of the rich becoming richer and the poor becoming poorer. Therefore, in addition to the most recent changes of having a minimum of 15% tax on the part of corporations, there needs to be a concrete way of using wealth to create job opportunities for the poor.
This program would ideally be run by a combination of the government, businesses, and philanthropic sectors to allow for the most streamlined methods of creating job opportunities that will develop products needed by the country. There are an abundance of fields where we could do this that would only create benefit, including but not limited to regenerative agriculture, ecosystem restoration (turning dead dirt into rich soil, including reforesting, wetlands, etc.), and clean energy. We’ve previously written about these solutions in greater detail here.
As we bounce off of Elizabeth Warren’s liberal ideas of having a minimum tax based on net worth, upon a closer review, it is clear that this would create undesirable unintended consequences of enormous costs for accountants, lawyers, appraisers, the IRS, and more.
It seems clear that the spirit of the proposal of allowing for wealth redistribution is a much-needed idea finding a meaningful benefit to those that need it the most and for a greater chance of peace in our country. First, however, a structure that will not cost billions of dollars must be set up to discern a person’s net worth. We also need to create a trustworthy conversion of this money that isn’t lost in another bureaucracy and instead reliably creates good jobs and products that benefit the country.
The method by which we create this taxation is not simple, and there may be an abundance of ways to accomplish this goal that are beyond the knowledge or scope of this article. However, some of the ideas that need to be considered are to have the following taxes be used for jobs for the poorest Americans to be trained to work in useful and essential jobs.
One of the most common objections to this wealth redistribution is that it may not give back to society enough. However, when we employ the right solutions to reduce or eliminate homelessness and poverty, we can create a system whereby people are given meaningful employment, allowing them to contribute to society and support their self-sufficiency.
If you wonder about the inefficiency of the government and deem such solutions a waste, then I urge you to reconsider as this would be a task taken on by a combination of businesses, philanthropic communities, and the government — it would mean onsite job training to create immediate benefit and improve profits and revenues, to make this a sustainable venture for all involved.
Another idea that has been considered through the years is to significantly increase the amount of death/inheritance tax to prevent the storage of assets being kept for the private use of wealthy families.
It is also important to increase the income tax rates gradually, beginning at $200,000 a year, and every time it doubles, there is another significant increase in some clearly defined way. Those against this largely base their objections on the erring belief that has been disproven over and over again — a belief that if those that are most wealthy are taxed, it would result in fewer jobs. However, by using this money exclusively to create job training and employment opportunities, it is quite evident that the reverse effect would occur.
This is especially true if this kind of taxation was monitored efficiently by a coalition of the government, philanthropic business leaders and the private sector. This could and would need a system for lean, intelligent job opportunity creation for the low-income and poverty sectors. These sectors have ironically proven themselves to be the highest motivated in most cases due to the immense desire to support their families and themselves and to live meaningfully, with hard-earned integrity.
These job creation initiatives would be combined with real low-income modular housing on the outskirts of most major cities in the United States. In some cases, it could create a series of communities that would benefit each other and, through the scale of people, allow it to have services that wouldn’t be possible if a given community had fewer people.
It could allow clinics, restaurants, enjoyable activities, and a sense of safety through each community member choosing a community that they would like to join. Here’s more information on the benefits of community living.
These communities could be comprised dominantly or exclusively of veterans, native tribes, or the homeless in various categories. These categories could include single women, families, those with addiction issues (with experts to give support), and individuals that have left prison (with extra security as needed) and many more.
The costs of these communities could be a fraction of what it costs to live in the city because of lower land costs and manufactured quality options throughout the country. There would have to be new flexibility of zoning in about half of the states currently. The other half doesn’t have strict zoning standards.
It is important to realize that there is no net worth tax, and there doesn’t appear to be an easy way to calculate an individual’s net worth. That’s why these individuals benefit from living a lifestyle that is often 1000-10,000 times more than those in the lower middle class. Therefore it makes sense to increase the income and death tax much more intensively to allow for the best chance to give opportunities for work to those that are most underserved and most desperate, suffering from food, shelter and medical insecurity.
Currently, the minimum distribution is only 5%, which commonly means that many tax-exempt foundations aren’t distributing any of their principles, so in effect, they are not using any of their principles to create benefit. This is a pool of trillions of dollars that would make a big difference if the rules were changed for the benefit of the survival of our world. There again could be a penalty for the foundations that don’t distribute that portion in any given year that would be steep enough to make a major fundamental change.
Even philanthropic foundations have a duty to use the money they accrue to create benefits in the world. So it’s better to help the poor and the planet right now instead of waiting and holding onto assets and allowing them to grow inside bank accounts or investments for the future.
There are a number of other ways that this proposal could be supplemented or replaced. We could add a luxury tax for the wealthy who have more than a certain number of homes for their personal use or indulge in extremely wealthy activities like buying paintings or jewelry above a certain threshold in a specified timeframe.
For example, someone with more than five homes, jewelry that exceeds a million dollars, jets worth 2 million dollars, paintings worth more than 2 million dollars, etc., would be taxed with the luxury tax. Any determinations would have to consider the amount of time it would take as we would clearly want to find a way that would minimize the number of extra hours needed. These transactions would convert a portion of luxury and pleasure transformation for job opportunities for the poor and global warming solutions. This wealth could be significant and require a minimum amount of experts to determine its value.
The major premise is to tax those that have significant wealth without creating a bureaucracy or added burden for jobs that are not needed to gain the maximum net benefit.
Clearly, these details and many others would need to be worked out as it is complex to base anything on net worth. It may even be that there is another more effective way to accomplish this purpose of having those with the greatest net worth pay a larger share to those most destitute. The point of this paper isn’t to establish a clear solution but to aim toward it and ask questions as to how this could be accomplished to have the best chance to benefit the world.
These are only the beginning ideas of attempting to live up to the constitution’s crucial ideals that sets America apart from much of the rest of the world, which is to allow everyone the opportunity to work and survive without incurring unintended consequences.
Police reform
We’ve previously talked about the importance of police reform. One goal would be to support the police with social services that specialize in violence control with expert psychological practices.
A nationwide, standardized training course for police needs to be created with standards that eliminate chokeholds which can and have resulted in death. It needs to be mandatory to use stun guns or the equivalent use of nonlethal force as the first line of defense for all officers. We also need more substantial psychological testing before being approved as a police officer.
As is extensively expressed in our article on police reform and restructuring, it might be worth creating a reporting system that is totally confidential to the police chief. This system would allow officers to rank their colleagues and seniors across levels of trustworthiness and risk of prejudice on a yearly basis.
To help create a better police force, we could either partner the most trustworthy with the less trustworthy or, in severe cases, move from probation to suspension or even dismissal from the force, depending on the evaluation. The solution proposed (especially the severe consequences) would only occur if a certain predetermined number of negative critiques is crossed for any police officer.
The reason this would work is that the high-quality officers would welcome the ratings so that they would not have to be endlessly vulnerable to being distrusted by the small percentage of prejudiced officers. However, it is of utmost importance that when creating the system, we place confidentiality and trust (in the system) at the highest levels. If police officers are worried about negative reactions to their honest critiques, we will not be able to get the full, truthful picture from them. We’ve explained the need for confidentiality and a clear understanding of the system here.
After this solution is implemented, we will be able to hire more officers for community relations and education offerings to schools, media, and the public. Funding the police to keep communities safe as it will pay for itself, especially when the discrimination of peer evaluation is put in place in a way that could lessen senseless death to our most innocent and honor the police officers that are devoted to their service.