Policy: What I Wish the Democratic Party Would Do

Lars Poulsen - 2024-02-01

Sometimes I think We Look Out of Touch

2024 is a national election year, and as so often before, many of us feel that this is one of the most important elections in our lifetime. On one side we have what seems like a far-right party, led by people who seem to have no respect for our democratic history or even for common decency, and on the other side, we have a coalition cobbled together of such disparate factions that it seems like the only thing that unites us is “We cannot allow the other guys to win!"

I feel that we can do better, and here are a few suggestions. I know that they are very controversial, but I think we need to talk about them. These are topics that we are reluctant to talk about, because there is disagreement among us, but as we try to avoid these issues, our opponents are using them to define us in ways that will make it harder for us to gain broad support.

The Federal Deficit

Republicans talk about the federal budget deficit (and the accumulated national debt) as a big scary thing which is out of control, and to avoid disaster, we must cut federal spending. The truth is that we do have a big scary national debt; it is largely created by the same Republicans by their reckless cuts to upper-income tax rates. The deficit balloons under every Republican administration, and is wrestled down under most Democratic administrations.

We should admit that we don't like the deficit either, and work hard to enact tax laws that will bring it under control:

Taxable personal incomes over $10 million per year should be taxed at 30 percent; over $100 million at 35% and over a billion at 40%.
Charitable deductions over $1 million should only be 50% deductible
A meaningful estate tax should be brought back for estates above $10 million
The tax-free capital step-up on death should be terminated
IRS should be funded so that they can perform meaningful audits of high net worth individuals
Unrealized and untaxed capital gains of securities with a well-defined market value over, say, $100 million should periodically be taxed, allowing the tax to be spread over a few years.

These changes would affect very few people; but the Democratic party leadership is addicted to the gifts that those people bestow on politicians to maintain the status quo. And this again is why working class people have lost faith in the Democratic party. With these changes, the deficit will disappear in a few years, and we could pay down the national debt in a few years after that.

Immigration and the Southern Border

“Democrats just want to open the border and let us be overrun”. No. We need to acknowledge that our immigration system IS out of control. The system is underfunded and understaffed and is unable to work as anticipated in our laws. We have very few avenues for legal immigration – maybe even too few. We (and by “we” I largely mean Republicans) have refused to implement the two things that would sharply reduce illegal immigration:

a national ID card that displays citizenship/immigration status
severe penalties for employers that knowingly hire undocumented non-citizens

The countries in Western Europe have these things, and they do not have the degree of illegal immigration that we have here in the US. But we have another problem, which we urgently need to address: Asylum seekers. We have signed treaties that oblige us to receive people who have a legitimate fear of persecution in their home country. We have pretty tight rules for whom we admit as refugees. If we had a sane system for this process, we would determine within a day whether a person had any legitimacy to a claim for asylum; we could reject the majority right away. And most of the rest could be determined in a hearing where they would have a chance to present some simple evidence. That would leave us with a rather small number that would be allowed to spend a few weeks to gather enough evidence to determine if they must go back or they can stay here. But we do not have a working process to make such a determination. The result is that people that ask for asylum are simply registered as having applied, and are then released into the country and told to come back for a court hearing in two years. In the mean time they can stay, but they cannot legally work. That is just crazy in so many ways:

If they can stay but cannot legally work, they join the illegal/undocumented work force.
Because ”everybody knows this”, everybody who wants to enter the country will apply for asylum, causing the system to become totally overloaded.

At this point, I would be willing to put a moratorium on all asylum seekers (i.e. ignore their claim under the treaty) until we have rebuilt our immigration processes.

(Note: A bi-partisan working group in congress had actually reached a deal very close to this in late January, but it blew up, when Donald Trump decided that he would rather campaign against a broken system than see the problem alleviated.)

We Need a Labour Party

My father taught me that to make a country work, you need to organize in a way that fairly allocates resources between the three groups that must come together to create wealth:

Capital (money)
Labor (workers)
Intellectuals (Scientists, engineers, teachers)

The political system is where this balance is negotiated. In a sane system, each of these major groups has a party to look after their interest, and elections measure their relative strength.

In our country, we have a structure that allows only two parties. Where this is the case, we normally have one party for the working class, and one for the moneyed class. During the 50 years from 1960 to around 2010, the Democratic party was mostly representing the labor interest, and the Republican party was the money party. But by the 1990s, the money people had bought their way into the Democratic party too. We need to find a way to fix that, but our constitution gets in the way.

1. Our whole system is based on the idea that our elected representatives represent a locality rather than a set of ideas and values.

2. Our election process where each party holds an internal election to select its candidates followed by a general election pitting the ones picked by each party against each other, drives each party towards its “purest” expression, which results in elected bodies not wanting to solve problems by negotiation and compromise.

The smallest change that might alleviate some of this would be to have all elections use a ranked choice ballot. Then I could say in effect “I really want the green candidate, but if he can't win (which I'm pretty sure he can't), I would be very happy with the Democrat. This works very well for a field up to about 5 for every post. We could have a “jungle primary” where anyone can run to select the 5 that go on the general ballot.

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