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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   27944 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 18, 2024

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That's a complicated question, and I don't think I can actually provide an answer for Americans because I am not one. I can tell you what those policies would look like for the country where I live (Australia), and those policies would probably look something like this.

  1. Cost of living adjustments - dramatic reductions in property values, dramatic reduction in immigration intake, increases in the amount of money provided to jobseekers/welfare recipients, muscular antitrust enforcement against major supermarkets engaging in price-fixing and collusion, nationalisation of toll roads run by overseas firms. I'd have to do some research and planning, but ideally I'd like to burst the real estate bubble while confining as much of the pain to the obscenely wealthy rather than the battlers who managed to get onto the property ladder despite the shithouse conditions.
  2. Actual taxation of the wealthy - creation of a petroleum resources rent tax, removal of all fossil fuel subsidies from major corporations, crackdown on tax avoidance by multinational firms and a full audit of everything PWC has ever done with public money. The entire fossil fuel sector in Australia contributes substantially less to national finances than payroll taxes on nurses and I think this is morally wrong (and not just inefficient). I'd also implement a progressive taxation system on income generated by real estate, with every property after the first getting taxed at increasingly ruinous levels.
  3. Muscular and substantial anti-corruption proceedings. Empower an actual body to go after incidents of government corruption and malfeasance, without being connected to the existing major parties and deeply compromised like the current NACC. There are a lot of scandals and naked corruption in Australian government and there's not going to be any trust in the government until that gets dealt with, and a lack of trust in government means there are a lot of good policies you just can't implement or pursue because the people don't trust government to do them fairly.

Re: 2, bear in mind that energy underlies everything we do and so energy costs propagate to everything in a way that others don’t. Ideally energy should be very cheap.

That's a very complicated question I've spent a lot of time posting about on here - but luckily, Australia is so comically corrupt that it is a lot simpler down under. Previous government leaders signed ruinously, comically bad deals that fucked over our national economy for personal profit. We're exporting natural gas during a domestic natural gas shortage, because corrupt deals were made that essentially result in us subsidising companies which extract fossil fuels then sell them to Japan at below cost so that Japanese middlemen can profit from the deal. Destroying all of that would actually lower domestic energy prices.

Fair

Ideally energy should be very cheap.

Good thing Australia has a bunch of uranium lying around!

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