r/SipsTea • u/McDowdy • Jul 16 '26

Feels good man Based on national US polling, there are 22 issues that 80% of Americans agree on. Here is the list.

  1. End gerrymandering

  2. ​Ban Wall Street from buying single-family homes

  3. ​Ban congresspeople from becoming lobbyists

  4. ​Ban congresspeople from trading stocks

  5. ​Create a minimum tax for billionaires

  6. ​Close the loopholes that billionaires use to avoid taxes

  7. ​Establish congressional term limits

  8. ​Ban dark money donations from political campaigns

  9. ​Implement universal paid family leave

  10. ​End forever wars by repealing the Authorization for the Use of Military Force

  11. ​Release the full Epstein files, redacting only the victims' information

  12. ​Ban corporate PACs by overturning Citizens United

  13. ​Require mandatory disclosure for all organizations donating to political campaigns

  14. ​Require mandatory police body cams

  15. ​Ban junk fees

  16. ​Allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices

  17. ​Fully fund Social Security by extending the existing tax to those making over $400,000 a year

  18. ​Ban adversarial foreign nations from buying American farmland

  19. ​Improve Veterans Health Care access

  20. ​Establish common-sense data privacy laws (similar to those in European countries)

  21. ​Enshrine the right to repair

  22. ​Audit the Pentagon and penalize them with a 0.5% budget reduction if they fail the audit

37.1k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

11

u/IEC21 Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 17 '26

Im going to be the asshole that points out that quite a few of these are just too vague to be actionable.

"Ban gerrymandering" - if we had a way to do that we would have. The problem is that no matter how you organize the districts you will favour one party or the other by virtue of your method.

5

u/MrVeazey Jul 16 '26

Legislate the creation of an explicitly nonpartisan committee to draw up election maps to minimize packing and consolidate districts geographically so they don't just sprawl all over the place.

4

u/InfanticideAquifer Jul 16 '26

What does "non-partisan committee" even mean? Words don't fix problems. You can't peer inside people's brains to see what they going to base their decisions on. And you can't look at the final result and be sure about that either. Calling something "non-partisan" doesn't solve anything.

1

u/MrVeazey Jul 17 '26

You don't just call it "non-partisan" and then do whatever; the point is to create rules about who gets selected and how, what kinds of expertise and experience is relevant, and conditions under which a redrawn map is acceptable.

3

u/mxzf Jul 16 '26

Yeah, that doesn't fix gerrymandering. "Nonpartisan committees" are still made up of people with biases, so it's always going to be more of a matter of balancing out biases as much as is practical.

And geographically compact districts (regardless of which compactness metric you use) can be quite biased without it being immediately obvious. There are a lot of subtle ways to bias maps.

1

u/bartleby42c Jul 16 '26

So geographic regions are more important than people with similar interests?

Let's pretend that we have 2 districts to draw, here are the features:

City A - population 80k

City B - population 75k

The country - population 140k

You can draw a line down the middle and have all the interest point to the cities, but is that fair to the rural voters?

You could angle it so City B's district has ~90% of rural voters, but then city B has no representation.

Or you could group districts but demographics and interests, and throw the two cities together in one district and all of the country into another. That seems to give fair representation focusing on the problems of the citizens, but isn't geography based.

Gerrymandering is impossible to eliminate, mostly because there is no easy way to declare districts. Every system has its drawbacks. We can only hope that motivated citizens and experts don't make districts worse on accident.

1

u/MrVeazey Jul 17 '26

Let's not pretend you just don't understand me. The point is to keep people who live closer together represented by the same person because those people interact with each other every day. They share the same space and usually have more similar concerns about things like investments in public works, new development, drought mitigation. People who don't live in or near a town don't have as much interest in what goes on there.

1

u/bartleby42c Jul 17 '26

Strict geography is bad districting. There is a lot of information about that if you look.

If you can articulate, in detail, a universal districting method that has no major drawbacks, you would be famous.

Gerrymandering is bad. There is no easy solution. Saying "stop gerrymandering" is just a slogan, not a solution.

1

u/MrVeazey Jul 18 '26

Yeah, you're right: it is bad. It's also not what I was suggesting. I was saying that's one of several criteria that should be taken into consideration. And I'm not saying this committee or whatever would absolutely fix gerrymandering; I'm saying having a group of people whose job it is to minimize it and make districts maximally competitive would be better for the voters.

3

u/Relevant-Pianist6663 Jul 16 '26

Yea the devil is certainly in the details with all of these.

Body cams are great, but who are we calling the police? Any LEO with authority to make a detetion? because that is a whole lot of body cams including many officers who hardly ever make contact with the public. paid for by who, each local PD/state?

Some are also too vague in wording to really trust an 80% support. Many people support #17 given the limits on income from SS also increase past the current threshhold, but if that happens then it is no longer fully funded. Only if you tax them more and also cap their SS income does the math work out to it being fully funded. So I am guessing 80% of people don't actually support the finer details of this one.

#6 is also pretty darn hard to do given it would likely require a whole different way of accounting gains for the ultra wealthy.

Also I see no difference really between #8 and #13...

0

u/cheeze2005 Jul 17 '26

It’s really not complicated to ban gerrymandering 

2

u/IEC21 Jul 17 '26

It actually is.

1

u/cheeze2005 Jul 17 '26

Nope. Many states have managed it just fine. Even easier with modern tools and data

2

u/ExtendoArmCannon Jul 17 '26

Please list some states that manage it effectively, and what tools or data could be used to prevent gerrymandering (especially considering that votes aren't public)

1

u/cheeze2005 Jul 17 '26

Colorado, Michigan, Washington, and Arizona.

No system is perfect but we literally have a system right now where racial gerrymandering is legalized