Insane Politics

[Architect]

It almost makes me want to cry that our politicians are so dumb. Most Americans supported the Obama/Boehner deficit-reduction deal, but it got shot down by the Tea Party.

I propose there be a "Sane Party" that agrees with compromise and disagrees with insanity.

We also need to un-gerrymander the congressional districts. Election parity would increase the number of moderates in the House.

[Digit]

Relating to the budget woes of this country and the argument between those who argue whether the wealthy should be taxed more (because that extra money could be used to pay down our debts) or less (because they create jobs (that's what some say, I'm not convinced they do as a general rule)), my idea was that the tax bracket should be changed so the percentage is higher by default for people making up in the millions of dollars per year, but that they could qualify for tax credits bringing them back down if they can really prove that they created jobs. If you cry that you should be taxed less because you create jobs, you shouldn't have a problem gathering documentation to prove it.

[Marduk]

This article http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/audi ... 16817.html brought this thread back to mind. It seems to me that part of the problem in any large group, and particularly one with such a grass-roots and visceral response as its impetus, is that the most vocal and active will always be those with the most radical ideas. In turn, this fosters a mob mentality where such ideas can have sway.

Perhaps it is time we move away from a two party system altogether.

[Dragon Lady]

Perhaps it is time we move away from a two party system altogether.

I've always thought the two-party system is … flawed.

[NerdGirl]

The two-party system certainly has issues, but if you have more than two parties getting reasonable amounts of votes, then you end up with minority governments all the time and that gets old pretty fast.

[Katya]

The two-party system certainly has issues, but if you have more than two parties getting reasonable amounts of votes, then you end up with minority governments all the time and that gets old pretty fast.

You can do ordered voting (there might be a more technical term for this), where you pick your first, second, and third choices for each office. By taking the second and third votes into account, you still end up with a majority candidate (so no coalitions), but the system is better for third party candidates because you don't end up splitting the vote.

(This idea was being tossed around in Maine politics last year because the independent candidate for governor got more votes than the democratic candidate, but less than the republican candidate. A lot of people think that the republican candidate wouldn't have won if people could have ranked their second choices, because the independent and democratic voters were probably more similar to each other than to the republican voters.)

[Architect]

I think the biggest problem is the "you're either with us or against us" mentality that everyone has. Once elected, some politicians swear to vote on party lines and never deviate from certain positions. As we saw recently, that can lead to ridiculous deadlock and nothing getting done. I understand standing by your ideals, but at some point there has to be compromise. I read somewhere recently that for the first time in recent history, the most "conservative" Democrat is more liberal than the most "liberal" Republican in the Congress.

The two-party system does have its ups and downs. If there are a lot of parties, and no one can agree to form a coalition, a lot of times nothing will get passed at all because everyone will just vote against everyone else's proposals. On the other hand, as we've seen, we're tending to get the (at least for American politics) extreme ends of the spectrum right now. I think for me if I could make one change to increase the possibilities of more parties it would be to can the electoral college.

For me, the problem with having two parties is that the candidates for every election are never that different than those from the previous election, and I never am very impressed by either one of them. I'm always about half-and-half of which one I agree with more.