You obviously don't understand any of the legal benefits from marriage, clearly. Say a long time couple with no kids die. Does the surviving partner inherit their estate? Or do the deceased's next of kin? And that's just one of the problems you're setting up with this boneheaded idea.
I'm a man, there are zero legal benefits to being married. Also, there's such a thing as "leaving a will", which is what married parties have to do anyway, even with "next of kin". Your children do not automatically inherit anything you didn't will to them. Likewise, "notifying next of kin" has little to do with being married in the first place.
The only legal benefits to being married are... um... taxes. But, you know, I'd rather pay the lower rate of filing single than jointly. All other benefits of being married only apply to women. Why do you think a lot of men are refusing to get married any more? There's no benefit to doing so and a ton of things that make it not worth doing.
If a tenant commits a crime and lives with roommates, those roommates will be charged as "accessory" to that crime. They should know what their roommates are up to. If they don't, they're bad roommates. I mean c'mon man, you can't actually think this is a good idea. This would require parents to violate their children's privacy constantly. Actually, it'd completely destroy the idea of privacy for anyone under the age of 18. Are parents supposed to be monitoring everything their kids do, 24/7, for their entire lives?
Parents are meant to be raising their children to be responsible adults. If they did their job, they don't have to destroy their privacy. If they aren't doing their job, then they would have to destroy their privacy. Raising a child correctly isn't all that difficult. Well, unless you're a lazy parent who just plops their kids down in front of the TV, Video Games, iPad, or whatever to get them out of your hair as often as possible rather than spending time with them.
My parents gave me an extreme amount of leeway in my life and a lot of privacy. But, I never got in trouble with the law. I didn't drink underage. I didn't do drugs. I didn't go out and cause trouble. Why? Because from a young age, my parents involved me in just about everything they did and spent the time to teach me how the world worked, what was expected of me by society, and punished me when I'd done wrong.
It's a very good idea and it will at least get the lazy parents to do their jobs rather than just having kids for the sake of having them and then being negligent and turning those kids loose on the world. The only people who wouldn't like this law are those that want to be lazy parents.
You clearly don't understand how courts work. Believe it or not, most death row inmates don't want to spend decades waiting to find out their fates. Court systems are overworked and overloaded with cases, that's why appeals take so long. By putting a one year limit on death row appeals, you're just gonna bog down the appellate courts and hold up everything else. And the fact you'd rather kill a few innocent people than have actual justice take time reeks of bait, and if it isn't, then oh boy are you messed up.
I'm sorry, but I believe in "the most happiness for the most people possible". I'm very utilitarian. If it requires our society mistakenly execute a few people innocent of the accused crimes in order to execute the vast majority of dangerous people in our society, then I'm in favor. No, I wouldn't even mind if I happened to be one of those executed as "an innocent".
Also, a lot of death row inmates file endless appeals in order to keep themselves from being executed. If they were to just accept their fates, they'd never file an appeal at all. Don't be ridiculous.
File your appeals in a year, set your court dates, have your trials, and if you fail, executed anyway. It's not a difficult concept to grasp.
It also wouldn't hurt to have some means of putting in an "express lane" in our court system for all other stuff.
Though, the less appeals you have going through the system, the less work there is going to be to do... so... you know, you might have an initial issue with the workload, but it would normalize once appeals started dropping and other laws went into effect.
Strange how you single out women and false rape accusations here. Every developed country already has laws against filing false police reports or falsely accusing someone of a crime. I wonder why you'd single out this exceedingly rare occurence as if it's some actual issue. It's such a stupid idea, but at least be consistent and extend it to all crimes.
No, it's not strange. It is the only crime that carries with it a punishment far greater than the courts carry. There mere ACCUSATION ruins the life of a man. He can be found completely innocent and the world still finds him guilty. Just the accusation is damning and damaging. It is also not as rare as society would lead a person to believe. An accusation with no proof can cause a man to be kicked out of college (happens all the time), lose his job (happens all the time), make him unhirable (happens all the time), unable to see his children (happens all the time), and drop his social status to just above pond scum (happens all the time). All of this happens before even going to court or being convicted. No other crime works like this in western society. None. It needs to be balanced in order to prevent abuse and to punish those who would abuse it with the same punishment that it causes the man.
The only people that wouldn't like this law are those that would like malicious women to continue to abuse it and ruin lives through that abuse.
Besides, women rarely get more than a slap on the wrist when it's found out they made the whole thing up. Seriously, go look it up. Even when undeniable proof is found, there are women who continue to believe the one making the accusation or worse... say the man deserved it anyway.
It's disgusting behavior and it needs punished.
Imagine thinking poor people are poor cause they've "mismanaged" their life. Flat taxes, in addition to being a terrible way to raise revenue for the state(aka the entire point of a tax), also tend to destroy social mobility and drive up poverty rates. Given how much you seem to hate people on welfare, the last thing you wanna do is drive more people onto it.
Poor people are poor because they've mismanaged their life. The only times in life I've ever been poor is due to my mismanagement of my own life or funds. A person can get a job doing pretty much anything and move up in that job fairly easily. All it requires is a willingness to learn new skillsets and apply those skillsets to other jobs. If you don't have a job, you aren't looking hard enough.
I started work at $6.00 some sixteen years ago. Bottom of the ladder. Entry-level position. No ambition to do anything but that job because it was easy to do and had almost no responsibility and everyone left me alone. 3 years ago, I began looking for a new job because I was only making $10 an hour doing that same job.
The problem? I knew too much and the reason that entry-level position even worked at all, was because I had been managing it and had been unofficially put in charge of it. In short, I was defacto "Lead". If I left, nobody knew how to do anything in there except the basic part of the job. I was taking a ton of information with me.
That information and skillset was leveraged into getting a new job. In fact, it's a job that never existed before me, created because of me. Supervisor. Sure, there was a "General Supervisor" that the position reported to sometimes, but that Supervisor didn't know anything about the job and let the entry-level position run autonomously so long as it was running smoothly, which it usually did, because it had to police itself and find its own solutions for everything since nobody would help it.
So, the new Supervisor position had the requirements of my exact skillset (they asked me to do a Desk Audit of my job to find out exactly what I did every day. That was then turned into the Supervisor job since it was essentially already a management job).
I applied for the position, got it, and got a $3 pay bump. I spent the next 2 years sorting out the division, making it as light and efficient as possible, getting rid of anything unnecessary, and giving my employees motivation to take on better paying jobs as well as giving them good references if they used me as one. My entire staff that had worked there for extremely long periods of time with no ambition pretty much all took jobs with huge bumps in pay and I had to hire a brand-new team. That "entry level" job that existed where people's will to live used to go to die is now a "stepping stone" to better jobs because I don't let my staff sit idle and resign themselves to this post for all eternity.
Just a few weeks ago, I took a new job. I did everything I could do in my Supervisor position and had been spending most of my days with nothing to do. I reached the upper limit of what was possible within my position. So, I decided I wanted more pay, I needed more skills to get that pay, and began applying for jobs again. I need a skillset that primarily deals with customers and phone etiquette, so I applied for two of those jobs. One of which was a Supervisor role (because frankly, I didn't know being a Supervisor was so rewarding and fun despite being stressful. I sort of found my niche). But, anyway, I can't move on to bigger and better things without this skillset, so I'll pass through this new job with our Telephone Service Unit and learn everything I can learn there before applying for something better again.
People are poor because they've mismanaged their own life. They got too comfortable. They decided they don't want to do more. They decided to be lazy. They decided they don't want responsibility. They killed their ambition and dreams. They spend their money on short-term bursts of joy rather than long-term money investments. Or, in the case of some of the homeless, they refuse to take their medications or get the proper help they need in order to be functioning members of society.
I've hired the mentally impaired in my job. You know what? They work just as hard as the people I've hired who aren't mentally impaired. In fact, near as I can tell, they're completely capable of doing higher functioning jobs than they do, but nobody ever teaches them how to. Why don't they? Because they believe they'll never be able to do it. They aren't smart enough to learn it. Or, it takes too much time and effort to teach them to do it. I've found that to not be the case at all. I hire them anyway so long as they've got the ability to retain information and a desire to complete the job correctly. Then, I begin the work of teaching them job skills that they could use at other jobs.
Also, a flat tax would actually work, and would provide the government an actual budget so they aren't wasting money on stupid crap. There is currently a ton of waste in the system for no reason. I work for a state government, I can tell you that about 60% of our budget is wasted on nonsense and fraud rather than actually doing with it what is meant to be done with it.
It is constantly amusing to me that people who think businesses are corrupt and need to pay a lot of money to the government don't see that same government as corrupt for having that same amount of money to throw around. At least the business has to make money and goes defunct when it doesn't. Government doesn't have to make money at all and has no obligation to spend that money wisely for any reason except re-election of candidates and political parties.
Florida tried this! It was insanely expensive, wasteful, and turned up very few people actually on drugs, so they killed the program very quickly. Turns out poor people care more about eating and having shelter than getting high. Then again, you clearly think very lowly of anyone in poverty, so I guess it's not surprising.
I don't know the details of the way Florida did it... but they obviously did it wrong. About half of my friends are of the crowd that "do drugs". Most of them are also on government assistance programs. In fact, I know people who sell their EBT money for drugs. Or who use EBT money to buy innocuous things that they then turn into drugs (including Meth for a time, until it became much harder to get some of the ingredients on EBT). I know people that use Medicaid to get prescription drugs that they then sell to other people for a high price.
My guess is... it's Florida. It's more of a surprise if that state does something correctly. What probably happened (because I work for state government, particularly government assistance programs, and it's what would happen here) is that they found an exceptionally high number of people using the drugs and just chose to sweep it under the rug. See, if you kick everyone off of government assistance programs, the people working for those programs aren't necessary, so they lose their jobs. Likewise, if you no longer need the extremely inflated budget because of all those people being kicked off the programs, you can't go to the state legislature and ask for more money. That money is often used for raises for the employees and to relax the standards so more people can get on... so we can ask for more money again next year.
This is such an astonishingly bad idea, you have to be trying to bait people. I'll bite. What's gonna stop companies from kidnapping and importing people from third world countries to be exploited under this system? Human trafficking is already an issue at this point, you're literally legalizing it with this program. Not to mention the complete and utter disregard for human life.
What stops them from doing it now? It won't even exacerbate the problem either. Nor does it make it legal in anyway. Kidnapping is still a crime. Human trafficking is still a crime. The difference is that businesses can no longer employ these people and these people have a good reason to not come here illegally.
Besides being a massive invasion of privacy and stupidly expensive, you're just setting yourself up for failure on this one. Most unsolved crimes aren't unsolved for lack of DNA evidence, they're unsolved because of shoddy police work or because crime scenes go undiscovered for years, past the point where forensic evidence can solve crimes. Not to mention, how are you going to safeguard people's genetic information?
How is it an invasion of privacy? Anyone can get anyone's DNA at any time if they want to. There are even services now where you can pay to find out someone's lineage using that DNA. A person literally sheds their DNA anywhere they go. You have no reasonable expectation of privacy with your DNA in the first place.
It's actually also not that expensive to get your DNA on file. It becomes expensive when you're trying to run forensic tests on the DNA to get a match or find reasonable probability of maternity/paternity. That's what makes it expensive. Just mapping your DNA is relatively cheap. It will only get cheaper as it is made mandatory as well, and places try to cut the costs of doing so in order to maintain competition in the marketplace.
It's also easy enough to safeguard your genetic information. Or at least, in theory. Same as your medical records (which, if I'm honest here, aren't safeguarded at all by any government agency! In fact, if someone wants your medical records, they are insanely easy to take without anyone knowing they were taken! Most are locked behind a flimsy desk drawer... when they're not spread out all over countertops... or put into plastic shred bins that are shipped out to companies to do the shred with no guarantee that they didn't look over your records before shredding!). You protect the information the same as you would with HIPAA compliance laws. You just keep the servers off the public internet to prevent hackers as another safeguard.
This is gonna do the exact opposite of what you want to do and just ensure the government is run by the wealthy, for the wealthy. Although given how you seem to view poor people, maybe that's the idea. Congress being payed minimum wage means only those wealthy enough to effectively not be payed for legislative work can afford to run for office. Say bye-bye to blue collar Americans holding office, and hello to corporate lawyers and CEO's running our country.
These are the people who already have office to begin with. What's the difference other than we're not paying them tax dollars to make them even wealthier?
It's funny that you keep making these assertions about how I'm wrong while ignoring the fact that these things are going on anyway.
"Only the wealthy would be able to run for office". Yeah, that's true right now. "Corporations and CEOS would be running our country". Yeah, they already do. That's why lobbying exists. That's who gives candidates their campaign money, usually in exchange for representing their interests.
The law isn't meant to stamp out the political system. It is meant to stop the country from paying already rich people tax payer dollars that could be more effectively spent elsewhere. Likewise, it is meant to ensure that the politicians are doing their jobs rather than using office as essentially "money making vacation".
This is a great way to kill the insurance industry. Insurance companies make bank by covering people who only need it for things like the sniffles or cough syrup. By making catastrophic events the only things covered by insurance, you're gonna drive everyone not at risk out of the pool and drive up costs for those who are, or who think they are, at risk. This will do the exact opposite of what you expect and lower quality of care and drive premium costs up.
The idea is for the insurance companies to make money on people who pay in every month and limit the amount of "paying out" they have to do. You know? The original point of having insurance? It's a pool of people's money that can be dipped into, "in case crap happens"? That's what insurance is. You pay in money to limit the risk to you when unpredictable life events happen to you.
I want health insurance to work the same as car insurance. You don't take your car in for every minor ding or scratch. You take it in for things like massive hail damage, car accidents, legal trouble due to a car accident, etcetera.
If Health Insurance worked the same way, in which they didn't pay out for minor issues and only paid out for the "in case crap happens", you'd eliminate a lot of fraud (like $800 ambulance charges to drive you 9 blocks where they did nothing except check your blood pressure once on the way and you were healthy). Insurance, as it exists now, eliminates competitive pricing in the healthcare market. People aren't charging patients what they think the patients can afford. They are charging patients what they think their insurance can afford. This is how you get $300 doctor visits that result in giving the patient Aspirin (yes, I've seen this) for a headache.
Insurance is insanely exploitative of the poor. Politicians have made it even worse by running with the (false) story that you can't get treated without insurance (I used to just pay in cash and never present my insurance because it was cheaper to do it that way. It was cheaper to tell them I didn't have insurance and ask what I owed, then cut them a check rather than give them a few months to figure out how to bilk my insurance and then have my insurance ask me to pay for part of that cost). Most places even used to offer "payment plans" on care you received. They often take whatever money they can get from you, if it looks like they can't get it through your insurance.
Eliminating insurance for simple things that SHOULD be dirt cheap if insurance wasn't involved is the point. Healthcare is only expensive because the patients aren't paying for it and insurance is. In short, the poor are paying for prices that the super rich can afford, all because the super rich have made a business out of saying they'll pay for your medical bills for you, and don't worry how much it costs.
It's exploitative of poor people and there's a lot of idiots out there who like to claim the opposite and then claim to have compassion.
Besides, you can always get treated at the ER, even if you can't pay. It's illegal to turn away patients who present to the emergency room as we value life in this country and want to save as many lives as possible, even if they don't deserve to be saved.
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Finally, I have nothing against the poor. I have issues with the lazy. The people who make excuses for themselves in order to continue to be lazy. I have issues with people who were told how to live life the correct way, did it wrong anyway, and now want a hand-out.
It is very easy to not be poor.
1. Don't have kids before you can afford them.
2. Finish at least High School.
3. Avoiding taking on debt as often as possible and pay off debt as quickly as possible.
4. Don't live beyond your means.
5. Get a job.
6. Use your job to fuel your ambition for more money and more job skills.
7. Use your job skills to acquire better jobs.
8. Budget your money and don't buy unnecessary stuff.
9. Avoid activities that are prohibitively expensive or illegal.
10. Avoid vices that will become expensive over time (cigarettes, alcohol, etcetera).
11. Don't count on others to do anything for you, and do as much as possible yourself.
12. Don't impose silly limits on yourself that restrict you from moving up in the world (I can't take this job, I don't want to move to X, that would be away from my family).
13. When opportunities show up, take them.
Barring extremely rare circumstances in which you're just screwed over by random chance... there really shouldn't be anyone who is poor or even without a job. And, really, society shouldn't be structured to assume everyone who is poor was screwed over by random chance, since it is insanely rare.
@Frostorm
Sure, you could have a loophole like that. But, there's nothing that stops that from happening right now. I think such declarations would produce a tax audit for you to ensure that yes, you really did make only $1. If a person really did make just $1, then fair enough. Though, if they were working for someone, I would think the laws about minimum wage would come into play.
What I have posted are basically the "short-hand" versions of the laws I have in mind. I've excluded a ton of details and caveats just because... well... nobody wants to read my walls of text anyway.
Plus, I do have the mindset of, "a law can really only do so much. You're not going to eliminate all fraud or loopholes. The best you can manage is stopping most of it.". Someone who wants to break the law will find a way to do so. Someone who wants to get around the law will find a way to do so. Short of turning the country into a fascist dictatorship, you aren't going to have a ton of control over that.
I would also like to point out that it's pretty difficult to "fool your employer" when it comes to illegal immigration. It would become even more difficult to do so if they knew they were at risk for hiring one. Where I work, we eliminate the issue very easily and with a two-step process. On hiring, you need to present a photo ID as well as your social security card and those go to our HR Department who makes sure they're valid and correct before you ever get paid.
Most businesses and companies don't require anything like that. They just ask you for your social security number so they can pay the money into that, and off you go to work. They don't have anyone even check if it's accurate or correct.
