Remedying the housing crisis

The most dominant driver of rising housing costs is the pervasiveness of private equity firms in the real estate and rental markets. Firms such as Blackstone Group, KKR, The Carlyle Group, and others buy up, land, apartment complexes, and single-family homes that they intend to use as rental properties and investment assets, driving up home prices, pushing everyday Americans out of the housing market, and jacking up rent across the nation. Meanwhile, American families just want an affordable place to call home. If this is the effect that these financial behemoths have on the real estate market, it is impermissible to allow them to participate in it.

Term Limits for Congressmen and Justices

As 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.

Enact Ranked Choice Voting Nationwide

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.

Enhancing Social Security and Moving our Retirement Systems Away from the Stock Market

It is shocking to think that our most ubiquitous systems of retirement (IRAs, 401Ks, and even most pension funds) are dependent on something a volatile as the stock market (something which also tends to have an inverse relationship with wages and cost of living in the modern era, but that’s a topic for another time). It’s a common story to hear how someone’s retirement fund took a huge dive during an economic dip or practically emptied out in a recession. My own mother, an aggressive investor in her retirement fund, even in her youth lost much of her retirement savings in the ‘08 recession, having to practically start over in her 30s. And I know she’s not alone in that miserable story of 2008. Rather than futilely hope and pray the stock market maintains continuous, uninterrupted, infinite growth, we, as a society should start building more economically sustainable systems of retirement that focus on carefully budgeting around paying retirement and pension obligations, rather than gambling it on the stock market. A good start would be making social security more robust. Social security is not played on the stock market. Its surpluses (when they occur) are invested in US Securities, but that’s it. Regardless, due to our out-of-control budget and spending priorities, it is still dwindling due to underinvestment in the program. We can help bolster input into social security by removing the contribution cap from the social security tax. Currently, the social security tax rate is 6.2% on income paid by the employee matched by 6.2% from the employer or 12.4% for someone who is self-employed. Neither the 6.2% nor 12.4% rate is applied to income exceeding $176,100. I can’t see a single justifiable reason that people who make at minimum, over three times the average South Carolinian’s annual salary should have a smaller proportion of their income taxed than the average worker. And remember, that’s where the cap starts. Someone raking in millions per year would pay the same amount in social security taxes as someone who makes exactly $176,100. Thats a lot of money left on the table that could go towards helping the social security fund.