Ask Lemmy

Universal Health Care

Single p(l)ayer healthcare.

Pre-k childcare

Court room staffers

Jury duty stipends indexed to cost of living.

Today, in my county, you get $20 a day. That won't even cover parking near the courthouse.

Serving on a jury shouldn't prevent you from being able to make rent for the month.

Funding the IRS to go after rich tax cheats.

Public healthcare, public education, public internet

Let's do one that wouldn't end up saving the taxpayer in the long run.

Universal access to legal council.

Too many matters are not brought to the court which probably should be because of costs to the litigants, and far too many times are costs to the litigants used as a weapon to keep people from exercizing their rights under threat of getting buried.

It's the worst kept secret that whoever has more money is gonna win the case 9/10 times and making lawyers salaried public servants as opposed to hired mercenary litigants, and providing access to legal services and council for free at point of service, would go a long way towards balancing the litigious inequality that is often experienced in the US.

So yeah, I'd pay more in taxes for the little guy to have the deck not be so blatantly stacked against them in the judicial system.

Education. Mental health facilities. Drug treatment. Healthcare.

Improved access to mental health treatment. We have free healthcare here, but the mental health side isn't great. This would also include support for those who are neurodivergant, suffering from trauma, experiencing gender dysphoria, etc..

Honestly, I think something that would be good as a policy is that at least once a year schoolchildren see a counsellor. Just to talk about anything that's bothering them, and give them help for things that are happening in their home life.

It's not so much about paying more, but rather directing where my taxes go. I already pay out the ass in taxes where I live, I'd just rather see my hard-earned income spent on public comprehensive healthcare... primary and undergrad education... automating as much production as possible... universal basic income.

Not blowing people up. Not digging for oil. Not bailing out corporations. And CERTAINLY not funding police with military surplus used to oppress and murder our very own citizens.

The people using my money for those purposes, and more, can go Fuck themselves to death. Preferably in the least enjoyable way possible.

Every social safety net we can get. I'm in the US with near zero safety nets.

job / income safety nets

universal health care

better public transpo and infra to support

public internet / utilities

housing

libraries

Universal access to quality food and shelter.

• Better public education

• Better public transit

• Fully funding the IRS to go after tax evaders

• Public healthcare

Funding for public defenders. They're chronicly overworked and understaffed.

An few orders of magnitude more IRS agents and people armed with pitchforks pointed at the oligarchy and corruption.

Anything that doesn't just funnel money back to millionaires. I've never understood people's aversion to tax, especially when they should be focusing on the rigged two party system that is at the core of the wastage.

If I have to choose one, universal basic income, it solves a lot of problems. It can help people in need, but if you want to be selfish about it, at least it lowers the odds that someone will rob your house.

As for people worried about making sure it goes to the right people, I would rather pay a few scammers than risk having someone in genuine need suffer

Auditing the government and its agencies

I would increase funding for parks. Trash cleanup and trimming plants is an easy way to make it look nice and employ people who need a part time job.

Public universities. Tuition expenses, salaries, and especially avoiding students from getting rejected.

Mental and dental

Healthcare.

Greater tax enforcement and higher taxes on capital gains. Being a rentier or investor should not grant advtanfe over anyone who works for a living.

bike infrastructure.

Better and cheaper healthcare and education.

Support for male victims of family violence which currently has less funding in my country than pets do.

Increased support for Ukraine.

It's at the moment more important than solving any domestic issues.

(I most likely don't live in your country, only argue for your favored domestic issues if you really have nothing better to do).

I would like the ability to choose (within limits) where my taxes go.

Say 60% always goes to 'general' and then you get to send the rest to health, education, military etc. as you choose.

Where I am, transit for damn sure. That is the one thing keeping us from being a great city

Well, to pull up some things that I've groused about on the Threadiverse recently:

In the US, I'd probably support more federal education subsidy, though I'd be also fine with individuals paying more for it. What I would like to see is states paying less, as if people move from state to state, the state that loses population is paying the bill to educate the labor force of the state gaining population, though, so I don't know if that'd meet your concern for "cutting taxes". I'd be okay with paying more to iron out a misincentive, though.

I've wanted the government to deal with looking into existential AI threats. I don't think that it makes sense for private industry to do so -- the incentives there just don't make sense. That'd take funds.

The same would go for certain other technologies that have potential to create existential risks. I don't know what the situation is for genetic engineering, but I expect that there will come a point in time that we are capable-enough at genetic engineering that we can create some pretty unpleasant self-replicating things.

We don't have self-replicating nano-machines either, but those would be something of an analogous risk; this is the gray goo scenario.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo

Gray goo (also spelled as grey goo) is a hypothetical global catastrophic scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating machines consume all biomass (and perhaps also everything else) on Earth while building many more of themselves,[1][2] a scenario that has been called ecophagy (the literal consumption of the ecosystem).[3] The original idea assumed machines were designed to have this capability, while popularizations have assumed that machines might somehow gain this capability by accident.

All three of those deal with technologies where one can create systems that rapidly expand without control and which I'd expect to become increasingly-accessible to humanity.

Military: I don't think that we have an effective counter for small UAVs today. This one we're already looking into. The closest thing we have in Ukraine today is maybe VAMPIRE (a vehicle-mounted system that launches APKWS missiles at aircraft). That's relatively cheap as anti-aircraft systems go, but it's still much more costly even in just per-shot variable cost low-end drones. China has enormous production capacity of low-end UAVs.

There are some policies that I think that it's probably most-appropriate for government to tackle, and I'm sure that dealing with them would cost something, but I'm not sure that the main barrier here is the money.

I'm not really a big fan of having radio devices broadcasting unique IDs from a tracking standpoint; a number of widely-used protocols do this. Tire pressure sensors are mandated by government do this. I think that it would be hard to avoid this without government involvement. Industry has little incentive to avoid this.

I think that we still have glaring problems with computer security as things stand; it's an area where I don't think that we are where we'd like to be in 2024, given how connected the world is. I don't have a specific program that could be funded that would fix the problems. In the past, there's been government-funded research here. It has maybe mitigated some problems; I think that Windows having a SAK was probably the result of government requirements.

I've complained about a lack of financial literacy education being made available in public schools. That'd cost something. But I don't know if that could really be a "spend more" thing, since unless one is going to extend time spent in school, it'd involve cutting something else.

I don't have any concrete pet projects, but I've generally not objected to funding basic research on outer space. Cosmology doesn't really have much of a route to a direct return; it's not really something for private industry. But I think that there's value to humanity building its understanding of the universe. NASA's had a list of projects that it had to cut to cover expanding James Webb Space Telescope costs; that may have been a reasonable prioritization, but I kind of regret that we had to give those up, even if they don't directly buy me much other than some novel science stories.

Work towards colonizing outer space is also something that I don't think has a whole lot of near-term potential for commercial return, but I'd like to see it happen -- probably nowhere near within my lifetime -- as maybe one of the better routes to help provide a backup for humanity. It might provide great benefits, but the window for that is just too long for private industry to deal with. It is probably a project that will span a number of generations, but some generation needs to start if it is to happen.

Hmm. I mean, for something to be the remit of government, I'd say that it generally should deal with internalizing an externality or being something that private industry just can't handle, and that's usually due to scale. I'm sure that there are some other things that'd fall under that category. Looking at the above:

• National defense should be done by government, because it deals with internalizing an externality; national defense is a public good.

• Changing who pays for education away from state level deals with internalizing an externality.

• Privacy in radio systems, at least insofar as it applies to systems where network effect applies -- like, say, the Bluetooth network -- involves internalizing an externality; my decision to purchase a device that increases lock-in to a network that limits someone else's privacy has a negative externality for them.

• Computer security has something of a positive externality in that compromise of one device can lead to an attack vector to another. It also runs into a problem where a device is difficult for an end-user to assess the security of; that's not an externality, but having informed consumers is a requirement for an efficient market. I don't know if it's really possible for most consumers to ever reasonably be sufficiently-informed to assess the security of computing devices that they buy across-the-board. It's like asking someone to assess the safety of an aircraft before riding it (where we solved the problem differently, without government spending, by assigning strict liability to manufacturers...maybe we could do that for computers, but that'd kinda kill open source, and I don't much like that idea).

• Financial literacy education...hmm. I guess I could also live with that being in private schools or homeschooling or whatever. It doesn't have to be public schools. But since most people in the US attend a public school, improving the situation there pretty much requires government action.

• Basic research on some things like outer space...I guess I'd say that that provides some benefit. It's non-rivalrous and non-excludable, so it's a public good with positive externalities.

• Colonizing outer space is just outside the kind of time window, I think, that private industry can handle today.

If they tied every expenditure to a tax that is directly related to the expenditure I'd like taxes. No more big pot of money. Military paid for by it's own tax from commerce that benefits from a military. Roads paid for by taxes on car sales or registration tax PR something, etc.