Things I would do if I ever came into power:
1. Take money out of politics. As it stands now, elections are expensive, and campaigns require a lot of money to finance. Especially presidential campaigns. So what results is that candidates need to find wealthy donors to back them. What this means is that rich people control our political system. Presidents, once they get elected, are beholden to the donors and will pass laws that the donors want. I am sure we are all familiar with this phenomenon. So, to fight this, I propose that we have candidates write down their platforms, their campaign promises, anything that they say to persuade the readers to vote for them, and compile a book out of it. Then this book is freely distributed both online and in paper-form in real life, so that anybody can access these writings very easily. This requires very little money (websites and paper are cheap). Then, we move to ban TVs, newspapers, radio, any other form of media, from mentioning any candidate at all. I want to do this because if we don't, then candidates that have wealthy backers will be able to buy TV time and spaces in newspapers to promote themselves. This gives them an edge over the other candidates who can't afford these things. So the end result is still big money influencing the outcomes of elections. Another bonus with having candidates write their stuff is we get to weed out the dummies. We expect our political leaders to be able to write. And to prevent them from simply hiring some hack to ghost-write for them, we lay out extremely harsh punishments for the candidates and writers who conspire to deceive the public like that.
2. Currently, there is absolutely zero recourse for the public if their president did not fulfill his campaign promises, or otherwise did a poor job as a president. I propose that we have this system whereby, once a president is retired from office, there be an account with all the banks in the country. We ask people whether they think the ex-president did a terrible job or not. If they think yes, they put 300 dollars in this account. If half the population do this, the ex-president goes to jail for an certain period of time. If 60% of people do this, he goes to jail even longer. And the rate at which his jail sentence lengthens goes up exponentially. And if 90% of the people are unhappy with him, he goes to jail for life. My reasoning is that with any president, there will always be some people who are dissatisfied with him. So I set the threshold at half of the population. However, if over 90% of people want to vote him into jail, then this is a very clear sign that he truly did do a terrible job, and an extremely harsh sentence is justified. The 300 dollars is set at such a level that it requires a not insignificant amount of money, so that people won't put an ex-president in jail lightly. But it's low enough that most people can still realistically afford it.
I want to do this because I remember talking to someone online. He was extremely unhappy with a certain law that a lawmaker in his state passed. He said he wanted said lawmaker to think, "if I pass this law, will I make it home alive tonight?" Apparently he was so unhappy that he was willing to commit acts of violence. Even though I share his anger, nevertheless I don't believe that violence is the solution to bad politicians. It's not realistic to expect people to take up arms and violently punish bad political leaders. There needs to be a way, a legal, non-bloody way for people to punish politicians for doing a poor job. Currently, there are zero consequences that politicians have to face for not carrying out the will of the people, so they do whatever they like. They know that they won't be punished in any way. The people know this is wrong, and they get angry. But this doesn't achieve anything. I want people's anger to mean something. Stewing in anger, complaining to other people, writing angry letters, making anger phone calls are currently all that we can do, and trust me these things don't mean anything to a bad politician. This has to change.
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