What do you believe is the main issue in the U.S. Goverment?

I like that idea. MPs here for a while were actually getting huge accomodation benefits. How ridiculous is that! People who actually have really low incomes can only get about $50 a week if they are lucky, and the MPs get hundreds of dollars on top of their huge salaries!

what Colleen says. Also, once a president is out of office, they should no longer recieve payment. Only for a few months(a year MAX) until they can find a job. That would be a heck of a lot of money back in the pocket of America alone I’m sure.

trying to get the corruption out of the government.

if only that could be done to governments everywhere

yeah right. its a shame that corruption is what is so wrong with every government. but theres very little we as citizens of our own countries can do

They are not doing what is below written. Limit all elected officials to 2 terms. No insider trading (they do that with Wall Street), no lobbing. Only make decisions based on the Constitution for the good of all people towards greater survival. Don’t allow any ridder in a bill not associated with that bill (pork-bellies). No influence from outside groups, which include: industry, labor, special interest groups, that all want what they want. Less government by the Federal Government. Let the States decide what is best for themselves as long as it concurs with the Constitution.

Political parties. Arguing all the time gets nothing done. First thing I would do is eliminate political parties.

Government officials shouldn’t be paid at all. That would not only eliminate unnecessary spending, but it would completely wrench corruption from it all. A lot of people go into politics knowing that there’s big money and big power in it. And I know it’d take years to institute it, but we should really consider the method Plato discusses in The Republic, even though there is a huge hole in it. We could find a way to fill it, I’m sure.

The point of political parties is so that different people with different opinions are heard and considered. Getting rid of parties would be like trying to start up communism here, “This is my opinion, now it’s yours too. Don’t like it? Die.”

My only question is, how do you know when it’s time to change the constitution? For example, there was nothing about slavery in it before the entire Lincoln fiasco, so all of those confederate could have simply said, “It’s not in the constitution, we rule ourselves.” I most definitely agree with the part about not having outside influences, but everyone on the inside has their own influence and their own reason for their being in power and in government. I’m afraid it’s just impossible to perfect government.

ensuring essential natural resources like oil to prevent the us economy from stagnating.

All political parties do is argue and backstab. Its nothing but a soap opera. I would never go for communism as I know it just doesn’t work. What I’m thinking is everyone just become a team, work together and discuss pros and cons of differnet ideas to solve different problems.

The problem with not paying or underpaying government officials is that it becomes necessary to be independently wealthy in order to take take these positions. Paying officials less would not decrease corruption but increase it since graft becomes much more attractive.

That’s a really good point, I hadn’t thought of it somehow. Campaigning shouldn’t be as expensive as it is. I still say we attempt Plato’s method. Start off with children, teach them slowly and eventually, testing them at certain periods, and in due course, adding philosophy into the equation. Those that pass the final tests become the leaders, and the ones that fail, depending on when they fail, become everything else that’s necessary. The only problem is figuring out who would write the tests, and who would grade them. This makes me wish communism worked off of paper as well as it did on.

how would cutting the salaries of govt officials help pay off debt? and which govt officials are making so much damn money that we could knock anything off the national debt. and why is the debt a threat to everyone? what is so damn bad about it? people seem to think its so damn bad but yet dont have any idea what its about? silly americans. which i am but seriously how is this debt hurting you? please explain

oh and who are these ppl only getting 50 dollars a week? like is that a real job? that sounds like once a week work. do you ppl really know what you are saying before you say it? and whats wrong with MP’s getting big salaries. if you want a bunch of money go sign and serve an eight year contract and say you should be paid a little to nothing. not that you said nothing but it sure seems implied.

hail bananaonion91ion! new leader. hail bananaonion91ion!

Lobbyists and professional petitioners. The richest should not have the loudest voice.

People want to make it a carrier out of it. Most become very rich the first term they’re in office.

Too much of it. It seems these days the government has to have their fingers in everything you do. Regulate this, tax that, control this, it’s horrible. And it has been proven the country runs much better when left primarily to the private sector. I think we get the democrats out and things will start looking up. I know it is impossible to bring the economy back if you continue to tax, even the wealthy. And you can’t spend money on meaningless crap like Obamacare and welfare extensions and think that is in any way gonna help the American people financially. I say lower everyone’s taxes, govern major laws and certain programs and let us have our country back!

hehe In Middle Ages England, around Henry VIII actually, the people were saying much the same about the Catholic (the only) Church. In those days the church was as much a Peace force as our Police/military forces are today. But as a population grows, the ease of civic administration decreases because disorder rises until a critical mass of opposite-thinkers arises - and then it rises sharply.

Each model of civic administration only works efficiently (cost per citizen) up to a certain level. You can see this in your own country by looking at the size of the building housing the local civic centre. In a city, there’s one big as a mediaeval cathedral or great mosque, and it might have sub-offices in same city. At the other end of the scale is a distributed system with a church-sized (similar status-sized) building in the district centre, with distributed service centres in the villages, but nothing in the outlying settlements (where everyone knows and helps each other).

Cities currently operate the most expensive model, and the costs will rise with population until the level of disorder it has to manage decreases. The two things populations demand most of governments and religions are Health and Safety, in this world and the next. In the current model of laws, both secular and religious (religious laws were originally the dominant forms of law, even by the time we discovered Writing) it is clear that they do not operate well enough to keep the costs of disorder from escalating.

Taxes will therefore continue to grow until disorder drops (locally in and wherever coin we contribute to the global management of planetary disorder) or a critical number of diseases are eradicated - those which result in 20% of the overall taxpayer-cost at that time. Safety includes everything that makes for bring up a family without fear of present or future harm. The reason for the increase in the number of nanny state economies is demand, through more people working instead of child-rearing. Much civil disorder results from the parents and schools not being able to compensate adequately for the reduction in parent-child time. It is at this interface where the maximum adherence to common sense about lifestyle choices, not killing or stealing, learning how to spend wisely and avoid debt, not to hate etc, takes place. A teacher is an inadequate surrogate, and we pay for this mismatch through greatly increased admin, policing and law-making costs. We also place greater demands on the teacher both as an enforcer of orderly principles, and as teacher expected to deal with increasingly high standards of delivery. Education costs therefore rise.

Bringing up children has become more expensive in real terms for millennia - very slowly - but in recent years the cost of securing your children’s current AND FUTURE prosperity (=able to buy security of their own) has risen dramatically in line with the exponentially increasing education need that children now have in order to secure their own futures. Education buys choice by necessity now, because you didn’t need it when there was a local factory or farm in walking distance that only required a minimum standard of education. The easy option has now gone, going or will go in every settlement as it hits the triggers on the scale.

Education costs will continue to rise because demand cannot decrease. Literacy is still very low, so there’s a cost not yet being paid for the training of those minds.

That’s just a simple example. The point is, these realities mean that ANY government will continue to have costs rising above income - the cost of funding future state pensions is very much in doubt in several economies - UNTIL everyone is much healthier, and smarter, and can get enough out of life without having to wreck someone else’s life to prop-up theirs. At that point disorder will end.

So you can vote for who you like, your taxes will rise. In the meantime, the outcome of the game is predictable; we can even start to predict when the health issue will be cracked. We still have the global safety problem to crack (very expensive until wars cease), then we can sort out education so that parents are a lot more prepared to deliver what their families need to spend more time bringing up the kids instead of going to work - assuming we still think the planet can sustain the current population of kids when they grow up and have kids of their own. When life expectancy was short, we needed a biblical birthrate to keep the population armed and growing. We do not have to replace the dead as often now, but we can’t kick the habit….

Once we get to the point where we can predict the end of war, a new renaissance will begin; funnily enough, that’s what happened when Catholic dominance of Europe had been enforced by law and heretic- burning, oh, and when Muhammed united the local warlords under one nation. :)

Until we are clearer on humanity’s real goals, everything else we do is simply rearranging the upper-class deckchairs on the Titanic. Because by the time the message sinks in, we’ll have spent too much on war to afford the climate-control costs.

You may be right about impossible for perfect government, but one can certainly try to create a workable government for the people. What is wrong is whenever government has tried to please the people with social services the government fails. They can’t keep up with paying everyone wanting. It has happened with every government in the past. What one finds out with socialism is governments have to put to many laws in on the people to stop them from crime. Communist Russia was one example of it. Just look at Cuba. Cuba has a very high educational system for it’s people, yet they can’t get jobs, so turn to crime to survive. Even Fidel Castro admits that his system of government didn’t work. It will happen here if our government keeps trying to handle peoples problems.
What the government should do is let privet individuals create privet business and have very low taxes on those firms so they can expand and prosper. If a company wants to go publicly traded there should be a rule that 52% of the stock should be owned by the employees and the rest on open market. Take away all welfare to those who are able to work. Those who don’t get jobs are put into constricted labor and paid for days work completed. If no one wants a job they are put into some form of forced labor or leave the country. Women who are on welfare because of too many children must work and the children put into daycare until the mother if off work. No free hand outs. The government should balance the budget and strive to make a profit, like they did before the Civil War. Any left over moneys in the treasury that money should be forwarded to the next budget or lower the taxes for the next coming year. Cut out 50% of all government workers and put them into the privet sector. Let the states handle their own problems, but should go along with the Federal Government policies for business and work.

There is nothing wrong with the Constitution as it is. Present laws have caused the Constitution to be out moded because of special interest, greed and those who want to dominate for their own purposes. Do away with the lobbyist and make a law that any business can’t influence with money vote or the likes. If it does the business is ceased, the executive exiled to devils island for live.

In a perfect world…

Teams are a great idea. The base issue is levels of organisation however. An individual is an organism that has certain abilities, choices and freedoms. A group of like-minded individuals has different balances of those attributes. A team may or may not be like-minded, but works well when the operating framework is well defined. A group/team can behave as an organism, but with restrictions. A community loosely adopts team ideas but behaves more like a group unless specifically disciplined - army, factory, etc, which behave like single-minded organisms. Larger groupings like corporations, cultures and nations behave like super-organisms with more complex behaviours. The tricky thing is that these make a virtue of their differences, like margarine varieties. So long as people think that their variety is more special than someone else’s there will be no change. You can prove this for yourself by snapshotting the world every 500y back in time and running the model I’ve outlined. Running a more detailed version of the model makes it even more obvious. The real questions: Is this bringing out the best for humanity, or just the best that 80% can provide for the 20%?