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Comment by apparent | Hacker News Reader

No chance 3 ever passes, and a wealth tax would require an amendment unless it is "apportioned among the states" or some such thing (and it can't be because wealthy people are concentrated in a handful of states).

Editing to add: It would also be a bad idea to abolish the EC because then candidates would only ever campaign in cities. They would completely ignore rural areas, which are financially and culturally different. This would not end well.

Separately, it would also mean we wouldn't know who the president is until all states are done counting, and it would complicate the recount process. Both are simpler under the EC, assuming the slow states are not close calls or big enough to swing the EC count (which they usually are not).

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> It would also be a bad idea to abolish the EC because then candidates would only ever campaign in cities. They would completely ignore rural areas, which are financially and culturally different.

This already happens, though. Candidates largely ignore entire states they know they can't win, as well as ones they think they will win.

(Ask Hillary if she regrets not campaigning more in Wisconsin, for example.)

In Australia you have "electorates" which are areas of roughly 100k pax. Each electorate gets one representative in parliament. Omitting some finer detail here.

Then by contrast the senate: each state gets 12 senators regardless of population.

Who cares about campaigning? It's whats happens after the election that matters: Does the representative represent their constituents? That's not an electoral system issue.

Each eligible voter should get one vote of equal weight to all others. The EC breaks that.

The EC doesn't "break" equal weights. The US is not a direct democracy; it's a federation of states. The states (semi-sovereign entities) get votes, not people. This is an explicit, intentional design decision.

If anything, we probably need to better subdivide states, and in several cases, at this point large metros (e.g. LA or NYC) should probably become city-states with direct representation in Congress but a loss of governing power and senatorial representation from the rest of their (present) state. e.g. there's basically no reason for voters in LA to have any influence over the governance of Redding.

Even more taxation without representation, nice.

Having to contribute 3 months out of every year to a government that gives you a proper, even 1/250,000,000 say in how many more wars it starts isn't really any more comforting. The solution to that is more localized governance to limit the impact of all the crazies you live among, not a more direct democracy.

> Who cares about campaigning?

Electeds. Where they campaign signifies who they think they have to convince and compromise with to earn their seat.

> No chance 3 ever passes

It’s honestly the hardest one on there.

> a wealth tax would require an amendment

Genuine question, why?

> It would also be a bad idea to abolish the EC because then candidates would only ever campaign in cities

This doesn’t mathematically work. Most Americans live in suburbia. (We define “urban” very, very broadly for statistical purposes.)

And this effect is more than compensated for by the existence of the Senate and even House.

> it would complicate the recount process

No messier than now. And you’d only be delayed in close elections, in which case carefully recounting everywhere is fine.

>”Genuine question, why?”

A wealth tax would clearly be a ‘direct tax’, which must be apportioned among the states according to the constitution.

Eh, this is debated. (Moore.) It could be written as an excise tax, too, push come to shove.

Capital gains are permissible because of the 16th amendment; the 16A does not permit the congress to tax assets. It seems like quite a stretch to apply Moore to cash holdings.

We already have taxes on assets. They're called property taxes.

The state govts can do things that the federal govt is forbidden to do.

Congress is not permitted to levy property taxes.

Tax money is fungible.

The 16th amendment plainly restricts taxation to income. Same reason there isn't a Federal sales tax or property tax.

No, the 16th Amendment expands taxation to income; there was some dispute at the time over its legality. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollock_v._Farmers%27_Loan_%26....)

Article I establishes's Congress's fairly broad taxing powers.

> The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/sales_tax

> The federal government has not enacted a national sales tax, although it has the constitutional authority to do so under Article I, Section 8.

There are federal capital-gains taxes. (I’d be fine with just treating wealth gains for anyone with more than $100mm as income, too.)

The irony here is (3) is by far the closest to actually occurring as in practice, it doesn't require amending the constitution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...

Of course, the SC could easily declare it unconstitutional....interpret any amendments as they see fit anyway. The decision on the 14th very nearly went the other way.

> The decision on the 14th very nearly went the other way.

Really? How do you know?

Because I read how each justice voted and several justices are advanced in age.

Counting votes is a rudimentary way to come to the conclusion that it "very nearly went the other way". SCOTUS is much more complex than that, as anyone who follows it knows.

> No chance 3 ever passes

No chance any ever passes. Amendment’s are difficult to pass by design.

The equal rights amendment which virtually nobody actually really opposes in theory in 2026 has been bantered around for 103 years as a concept and 54 years after congress approved it and sent it for ratification. Its close, but still no cigar. This is an amendment that is hardly controversial bit still cannot manage to be passed due to procedural issues and set deadlines being missed.

Now consider just how much effort and how long a controversial amendment would take…

> It would also be a bad idea to abolish the EC because then candidates would only ever campaign in cities.

As opposed to campaigning exclusively in the half-dozen swing states that matter?

At least those states have a mix of urban/rural/suburban areas. If there were no EC, Dems would campaign exclusively in cities.

Those cities encompass both urban and suburban areas, and they represent something like 80% of the country's population.

While I'm sympathetic to the notion rural areas should not go unrepresented, I find an electoral system where you only have to secure electoral votes for states representing ~25% of the population to win, only a handful of which you need to campaign at all due to the winner-take-all nature of virtually every state's electors to be strictly and starkly inferior to one in which a candidate needs to campaign for no less than 40-45% to secure a plurality.

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