One of the many reasons we struggle to afford important public goods that are commonplace in other countries is because we do not require those with incomprehensible levels of wealth to contribute fairly back into the society that made them rich in the first place.

As a result, both money and power continually accumulate at the very top with rich getting ever richer, and the poor getting ever poorer.

This problem is not best solved by increasing taxation on income. The incomprehensibly rich make their wealth through ownership and assets, not through labor like the rest of us.

Firstly, we must close the loopholes built into our tax code. The super rich can get away with paying little to no tax through methods like borrowing against their own assets and either paying an extremely low interest rate or simply defaulting. Since loans are not taxed, they can cash in their assets without paying taxes like Capital Gains.

Secondly, we must rework our tax code to more heavily tax ownership of assets above certain thresholds.

This can take any number of forms, such as taxation of net worth above an established threshold, increasing capital gains taxes above a certain threshold, increasing taxation on large scale real-estate investment and private land ownership, (also an effective method of fighting the housing crisis) or increasing taxes on corporate profits (which helps force corporations to reinvest in its workers and profits instead of stock buybacks).

DescriptionAs a measure against corrupt and self-serving career politicians, term limits equating to 12 years each should be applied to the US senate and House. In order to maintain a more fair and balanced supreme court system, each supreme court justice should serve a single eighteen-year term with no ability to be appointed for additional terms. A single new court appointment would occur every two years. I also believe that US representatives should have their terms extended to 4 years, so they spend less of their careers campaigning, and more of it legislating.

Ranked choice voting is a voting system that enables voters to exercise their voices outside of the two-party system without risk of “letting the other guy win.” The idea is to enact a system where people do not have to compromise on their ideals by voting for a “lesser of two evils.” Ranked-choice voting works as follows: A voter lists candidates in order of preference on their ballot. All of the first-choice votes are tallied. If no candidate has received 50% or more of the total vote in this first round, the candidate with the fewest votes is knocked out of the race. The votes of the voters who chose the eliminated candidate are then allocated to the voter’s second choice instead. This process is repeated until there are only two candidates left, or one candidate obtains 50% or more of the vote.

Environmental degradation is the single greatest challenge we face as a species. The list of crises in the making is long. There are issues of overuse and mismanagement such as soil depletion, aquifer depletion, chemical and pesticide runoff, and deforestation, as well as effects of climate change like water scarcity, extreme weather events, desertification, collapsing food chains and life cycles, and sea level rise.

From power generation to agriculture, there are numerous fields in which we must change the way we do things if we wish to live sustainably on this planet. Fortunately, there are already solutions to the vast majority of our ecological problems.

Transferring our electrical grid to power sources like nuclear, solar, and even geothermal energy can not only provide power without emitting any CO2 but help us achieve energy independence.

Indoor farming techniques require upfront investment in infrastructure but can be done almost anywhere there is water and electricity, uses a fraction of the water, produces significantly higher crop yield by area, doesn’t deplete our soil, and generally doesn’t require any harmful pesticides.

Relying more on public transit options like trains instead of cars is not only environmentally friendly but alleviates traffic in high-population areas like we have in the Lowcountry.

And last but not least, the best way to remove the carbon dioxide already in our atmosphere is not through expensive carbon capture projects, but through the conservation and rewilding of key carbon-sink ecosystems like mangrove forests, parries, and coastal wetlands.

Many Americans don’t even realize we technically do have some fairly robust (although not totally sufficient) campaign expenditure laws on the books in the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971. This is because Citizens United and other court rulings have thoroughly obliterated the intent of our written campaign finance laws. These decisions opened the doors for Leadership PACS (political action committees) to fund the frequently lavish lifestyles of favored candidates and politicians, and for Super PACS to collect and spend unlimited sums of money from wealthy parties to campaign for chosen candidates and policies. Just as long as they “technically do not directly coordinate with the official campaign.”

Legally, as things currently stand, we either require the overturning of these egregious court rulings, or amendment to the constitution to reinstate, and hopefully even bolster our existing campaign finance laws.

In the current American healthcare system, we spend roughly twice the amount on healthcare compared with other developed nations, (all of which have some form of universal healthcare) all while experiencing worse healthcare outcomes and paying exorbitant out-of-pocket costs. The main culprit? The private health insurance industry, which acts as a costly and unnecessary middleman between us and the healthcare we need. Not only does its overhead expenses alone add to the cost of US healthcare, but the insurance business model places an inflationary effect on the cost of healthcare and medicine while incentivizing doing everything possible to deny care, even when it’s needed. It’s high time we recognized healthcare as the public good that it is, rather than just a for-profit industry.

From the mouths of politicians, we often hear promises to support legacy industries like big oil, be it through direct subsidies, tax breaks, or lax regulations, but the pragmatic and forward-thinking strategy is to aggressively support the development of the emerging cutting-edge industries that will improve lives, drive growth, and propel us into the future. This is doubly important for regions of the US that, with the right investment, could see new industries with massive growth potential replace waning industries that residents rightfully fear losing. Investments in industries like next gen nuclear energy, multi-story indoor farming, renewable energy manufacturing, and aerospace innovation can not only produce technologies that improve our lives but bring us economic prosperity through the export of the very same technologies and their associated manufactured products.

It’s no secret that tech companies love to collect our personal data. They then either use that data to push (sometimes predatory) targeted advertising on adults and children alike or sell that data to data brokers. Data brokers who will sell that personal data to anyone who will buy it, including phone and email scam operations. Our personal data belongs to us, not big tech companies. We need to enact legislation that bars these organizations from collecting and trading our personal information for profit.

The minimum wage, as established in response to the great depression, was meant to ensure that anybody who worked full time could maintain a decent standard of living. Today, the federal minimum wage, last raised in 2009, stands at $7.25 per hour. With the rising cost of living, that isn’t enough to get by anywhere anymore. An increase is long past due.

Decades of corporate influence in politics have eroded the worker’s protections and collective bargaining rights that ensure workers can advocate for their own worth and fair treatment. These rights must be fully restored so workers once again counter the leverage that large employers have over workers.

Energy independence would be of great benefit to South Carolina and America at large. Replacing fossil fuels would not only represent great progress in mitigating climate change and its effects, but it would insulate the economy from shocks to the fossil fuels market and make us less economically reliant on and vulnerable to large oil and gas producers like Russia and Saudi Arabia. Advancements in the fields of nuclear energy, battery technologies, and geothermal energy, among others are increasingly capable of getting us there. Investing in these industries instead of subsidizing fossil fuel companies could not only revolutionize our electrical grid for the better but could serve as an incredible source of revenue and employment through production and export of our services and technologies to other countries. That works best if we prioritize development and become the leading edge in those fields.

Geothermal is particularly promising because with current advancements in the field, existing coal plants will likely be able to be converted to geothermal plants, reducing the need to build whole new facilities.