Wednesday, September 2, 2009

If I Were King of the United States

Another Topic du Jour.

We would all live in the projects. There would be no such thing as private houses anymore. All the projects would have the same basic design, structure, materials, etc. The rent would be thirty percent of your income.

Five years of college or a bachelor's degree (whichever comes first) would be mandatory and funded in much the same way as the rest of the public school system. Which would mean that by the SAT/ACT standards of most state universities, there would be none of the functionally illiterate high school graduates that are running around now.

Military service would be mandatory for two years after high school and before college, because a.) you never know when you might need a largish standing army and b.) you value citizenship more when you have to defend it. Pacifists will be given non-combat duties but still expected to serve. People who want to stay in the military will have that option after college.

Voting at the state and national levels would be mandatory. Anyone not voting would be subject to double taxes.

Community service would be mandatory. At least eight hours a month volunteering at any non-profit organization.

Everyone would have Medicaid. To hell with the insurance companies.

...More later. Tomorrow is gonna be a long day and it's way past my bedtime.

12 comments:

Alison Gibson said...

i like the voting rules and the medicaid. i can't believe you guys dont have those yet! i don't like the idea of community service being mandatory, unless it was on a time frame like the military service. but more of it is always good, obviously! you have a scary enough military as it is, so i think i'd be uncomfortable knowing it was just getting bigger and bigger! and not everyone wants to study, so i'm not sure about the bachelor's degree. though it should definitely be available to anyone who does want to try. i like the idea of everyone having similar houses/percentage for rent etc. though i think if all houses actually looked the same then cities would become rather boring looking.
what an interesting post though! i wonder what i'd change about australia...

luvblinds_u said...

I simply don't like the picture of everything and everyone having and doing the same thing...

Morthax said...

The housing thing because I've been homeless a few times and - to put it bluntly - it sucks. There's no excuse for a country to let its people sleep on the street. Besides, if everyone lived in the same sorts of buildings, it would free up a lot more money that could be spent on more important things. They can still decorate them as they like. The city I live in now has a number of derelict buildings and a larger number of homeless people. That strikes me as something the owners of those buildings should be ashamed of.

The college would just be an extension of the regular school system. You don't necessarily have to graduate, you just have to go. This gives people who would not normally be able to go without taking out ridiculously big loans a chance to do so. And it ensures that people WILL have a basic education. None of the colleges I went to would accept people without at least a GED.

The community service...come on. That's one day a month. Or an hour a day for eight days. Or half an hour for sixteen days. Charities are pretty flexible when it comes to volunteer work.

And for the military. Well, authority comes out of the mouth of a gun and even in a republic, it's good for the citizenry - the keepers of authority - to know how the gun works. Besides which, the more people are familiarized with violence and how to perpetrate it, the less likely they are to resort to it. It's one of those weird paradoxes of human nature.

lifechick said...

I like the idea of screwing the insurance companies. God knows they screw us enough. Instead of making certain things mandatory, I would provide an incentive (such as a tax break) to encourage voting, community service, etc.

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