Forum Post: Let's have some more creative demands!

I would like to see this site become a place where new ideas emerge, which have never before been given a hearing. So I'll throw out a few, see what happens. ;)

1) DO NOT TAX THE SICK TO PAY FOR RESEARCH. For-profit pharmaceutical research potentially benefits every one of us, and I want it to thrive and make a fair profit. But I don't think the sick should have to pay for it. So I don't think that market exclusivity is the right way to reward successful pharmaceutical companies, because it means the sick pay tremendously inflated prices - nowadays, sometimes more than $100,000 for drugs like sunitinib. Even drugs that have been used since before the FDA existed, like colchicine, are now at risk of abruptly being monopolized simply because a company did the paperwork, after all this time, to demonstrate their safety. The situation is even worse when the companies receiving these royalties use the money more for marketing than for research. It's worse than that when the marketing is dishonest, like when the makers of Oxycontin represented it as less addictive than other opiates, or when manufacturers find one small circumstance where their drug might be better than the generic, then train consumers to parrot those exact symptoms to the physician in order to receive the new drug. I think it makes far more sense to abolish all exclusivity - patents, biologics, special extensions and incentives, orphan drugs, everything. Instead, put up bounties of tax money for drugs which successfully meet milestones in development, from the first screen for in vitro activity to the final passage of phase III trials. Simply pay them to do the research, no marketing, no spin, and above all, no need to borrow venture capital ten or fifteen years before the profits start streaming in.

2) CREATE A CONSUMER-CONTROLLED REWARD SYSTEM FOR CREATORS THAT DOES NOT RELY ON COPYRIGHT. There was a time when copyright was a small tax attached to an expensive process of printing, and was actually feasible - but that time has passed. And there was a time when copyright was intended to, and perhaps even benefitted the actual authors and creators - but that time too has largely passed, and singers now complain that they have been reduced to "indentured servants", forced to sign decades-long and unrewarding contracts in order to be permitted past the gatekeepers who control access to the public. Without copyright, everyone can have access to every song, every book, every movie - and the freedom to modify and work with them in any way imaginable. All we need to do is to take the same average amount of money per capita that we would have spent on royalties, and instead make it a surtax on the income tax. But we give everyone the right to check off where they want to send their money. We allow anyone who wants to set up a nonprofit that distributes money according to their own ideas of what is good and worth funding, and each taxpayer gets to choose how to divide his money among these organizations. This avoids turning things into a socialist scheme where you get the government's taste in music; it's the people who decide.

3) ESTABLISH A RIGHT TO EMPLOYMENT BACKED BY APPROPRIATE CORPORATE TAXATION AND SUBSIDY. Today we have a patchwork of systems to try to encourage the hiring of certain groups - Affirmative Action, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and some ground-breaking experiments by cities like Philadelphia and San Francisco to encourage the hiring of felons who have served their time by giving companies a serious ($10,000) tax break. ( http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/10/18/MNT31LISSG.DTL ) It is within our power to combine all these and reduce unemployment altogether by adopting this example on a national basis. Increase the corporate tax significantly - but earmark every last penny to go back to the same corporations taxed, in proportion to the number of jobs they create, with bonuses given for when they place hard-to-place people. Companies that make profits without hiring people would have to give some of them up to those who hire unusually many, reflecting the ground truth that when capital makes a profit without paying employees, the country suffers. Without politics, we could establish that any group you can discern which suffers from significantly more than 3% unemployment among people actively looking for work whether it be blacks, gays, Jehovah's Witnesses, fat people, Little People, whatever - automatically gets periodic increments to the subsidy until such time as the hiring inequity goes down. This may seem unfair at first glance, being somewhat like a quota system, but remember, the point is for everyone to have an equal and easy time getting employed at a living wage. While such transfers of funds will incur paperwork and an administrative cost, we should recognize that having an extra 6% of people not doing any work also costs our economy money - a lot more money than the paperwork, if the system is set up with any competence.