LogFAQs > #965428788

A mixture is the obvious solution, and also avoiding a form of capitalism that focuses on the wealthy and corporations, ensuring that money is distributed based on work/effort and not power/wealth).

A baseline of income for everyone who is working, those who are disabled and those who are retired makes sense, and can still allow for a wide range of incomes and wealth levels. Socialism can simply mean that we, as a people, work at least in part for the betterment of our nation as a whole, and to ensure everyone has a baseline of care/resources to live on.

Many simple ideas such as universal healthcare (and enough hospitals to provide it), a good education system (that doesn't put people into life long debt to obtain), and affordable housing can be implemented without totally scrapping capitalism. A portion of taxes can be used to provide the above, but more importantly, the above should be considered right and NOT used as a means of creating profit for individuals.

Nobody should be making Billions of dollars a year on education. Rent should be regulated, allowing for a profit, but controlling the amount people can charge based on available properties. There are so many places to live right now in this country that nobody is using, that if you divided the rent costs by all the available places to live it would be less than half (maybe even 1/3rd). Property taxes need to be constrained as well, and not based on the "value" of properties which can be (and currently are) seriously inflated (often by banks/corporations etc by not selling homes, or leaving them empty etc).

Taxes would not even need to change much to provide a semi-socialist setup that makes life better for everyone. In addition, base pay should increase along with a % of all pay under a "living" wage line (say 50k a year at this point), both hourly and salary. You can not just keep raising minimum wage and throwing more and more skilled jobs into the minimum wage pool as you go along. That just makes more and more people live on the bare minimum poverty level wages while increasing the cost of everything so their lives are harder.

Simple, quick solutions (longer ones could be enacted later).

Increase the base tax deduction per year from 12.5k to 20k single (40k married).

Set taxes on properties based on the lowest value of a home in the last 10 years. It only increases as that number does (so currently lowest value on a home since 2012).

Both invest in low income housing across the nation to provide cheaper rental values, and set max rent prices by square feet to something reasonable. It should not cost more than 1k/month anywhere in the US for a 1 bedroom apartment, with the possible exceptions of beachfront property or other major reasons for a higher price.

Build more hospitals while expanding free healthcare to everyone (stop making it be a for profit buisiness), and more schools while paying teachers more, providing security and teachers aids/supplies. Education should be a priority in this country. Stop making education for profit at all, and provide higher education for a baseline cost (IE how much it costs to actually pay the teachers a decent wage). If that was the ONLY cost for education (which it should be), it would be a tiny fraction of the current cost to get a degree.

Those changes alone would have a HUGE impact on the daily lives of most Americans and other than a very few extremely wealthy ones, all positive changes. Many of the changes just cause billionaires to stop milking americans for health and education, and it would restrict how much of a profit landlords could make as well (but also reduce the taxes gained from properties so help them (especially those who were not renting and struggling to pay extremely high property taxes at this point).

Taxes would need to change a bit, but not drastically, becoming more like many European countries, where you get taxed on income over a living wage, but by a larger amount. Getting rid of loopholes so the wealthy actually PAY 30% or more, instead of somehow paying 8% while average americans pay 3-4x as much (percentage wise) would be a huge deal.

If you actually taxed the top 20% of US citizens over 30% (Say 33%) of their total profit per year, that would probably more than double our current taxes and easily pay for everything above (with money left over).

That is still a capitalist, money focused society, but one that is fair, gives value for work performed and prevents vultures from profiting on the health and education of our citizens.