Excellent topic.
Here are my ideas:
There must be limits on inheritance. Something still high enough to mean something, but not so high as to allow perpetual wealth accumulation like we see today. Maybe, 2 million dollars is the limit. Anything beyond that cannot be inherited and is taxed at 100% when a person dies.
There must also be a WEALTH tax. As much as I hate taxes because they represent the State stealing from the people, the issues we face today require this mechanism to balance things out. A wealth tax would only kick in above a certain threshold, like 5 million dollars. Anyone who is worth more than that, not only pays their regular income tax and capital gains taxes, but also pays a wealth tax on any remaining wealth AFTER their other taxes have been calculated. The wealth tax is on their net financial value including all of their assets. I would propose a structure like this:
5-50 million dollars of wealth, 10% wealth tax
50-500 million dollars of wealth, 15% wealth tax
500 million-1 billion dollars of wealth, 20% tax
1 billion+ of wealth, 25% wealth tax
Next, we need a payment plan to pay down the national debt. This is critical. And it can be done, I calculated some numbers about this the other day. Basically, every American citizen will receive a bill along with their taxes each year. The bill will be their portion of helping to pay down most of the national debt over a 20-year period of time. It is monthly, so they can arrange to have this auto-paid each month or they can pay it all once a year. And, if they are very low income they can choose to have the payment deducted from their other benefits they are already receiving.
If you run the numbers you get something like this:
Lowest income earners: $100 a month
Middle income earners: $400 a month
Highest income earners: $800 a month
If you stretch that out for each citizen, every month for 20 years you end up making a very huge reduction of the national debt.
Next, we need to enforce anti-trust laws. Monopolies of the largest tech and banking and media corporations must be broken up into smaller competing corporations. This is a no-brainer.
Once the national debt has been reduced significantly, we can lower income taxes for everyone. This will especially help the middle class, since income taxes are regressive on the middle class the most (the rich easily pay or dodge income taxes, and the poor tend not to pay anything in income taxes).
What else? We need total financial transparency for all politicians. Anyone elected to public office must submit to full public audits of their financials, bank statements, investments, everything. To make sure there is no bribery, fraud, insider trading etc. going on.
And we should return to a much smaller, more limited government. Like the US Constitution intends. A lot of the problems having to do with hyper-capitalism are caused directly or indirectly by the fact the federal government has become controlled and co-opted by the super rich, and become so bloated and huge that the fraud and kickbacks and waste and abuse are beyond measure. The US federal government is also the reason for so many wars and problems in the world today, including weapons and drug trafficking, regime over throw, etc. Obviously the US should immediately stop supporting NATO and withdraw from that fascist organization too.
Hm, what else would be helpful… much harsher prison sentences for violent criminals. Anyone convicted of murder, kidnapping, rape of a child, things like that should be locked away with zero chance of ever rejoining society again. This would single-handedly cause a huge and permanent drop in violent crime within a single generation. This is related to capitalism because for capitalism to succeed we need a relatively peaceful society and commerce. The levels of violent crime in America are way too high, especially in large liberal cities. It is easy to stop almost all violent crime: lock up the criminals and throw away the key. Most violent crime is done by repeat offenders. So this would be one way to bring society back to being more peaceful, cooperative, more trusting.
I’m sure there are other things that could be done. Like reducing our dependence on foreign states for our own economic productivity and manufacturing. Tariffs are a weak idea because if the foreign country doesn’t agree to shoulder that cost, the cost ends up being paid by Americans. Instead, simply cut taxes and/or subsidize domestic production. Best would be to give a tax-free incentive in certain sectors of the economy for purchase of domestic-produced goods and services, while foreign ones continue to have their regular or even higher tax rate in terms of sales tax. You could also offer tax rebates to individuals and companies who purchase a certain percentage of their goods and services domestically.
The government should also stop mass immigration immediately, remove a lot of the people who are already here illegally, have an effective border, AND reform the legal immigration system so it actually works decently well.
Government should also incentive people to have families in married couples. Married couples can get a much better tax credit, but especially they get a big tax credit for every child they have. The government can also give interest-free loans to married couples with children so they can buy a house.
I’ll have to add more ideas later as I think of them. So far this seems like a pretty good start.
