Chinese Legislature Conducts Large Online Vote 152
hackingbear writes "In a bid to reform the tax law and raise person tax exemption to 3000 Yuan per month (or about US$5000 per year,) from 2000 Yuan per month, the Chinese legislature has conducted a massive online vote on the pending legislation. The [National People's Congress] Standing Committee, China's top legislature, on Wednesday publicized suggestions and opinions on amending the Law on Individual Income Tax that were submitted online from April 25 to May 31. Among all 82,707 citizens who commented on the proposal, [only] 15 percent of them favored raising the exemption to 3,000 yuan. However, 48 percent suggested to further raise the exemption to 5,000 yuan per month. While the online votes are not binding, the outcome likely shape the final bill. We'd hope the US Congress would dare to collect real citizen input on its legislation, rather than just doing lip service or useless political arguments."
What a concept! (Score:5, Informative)
Actually making use of technology to drive government.
I believe the only way a true democracy can be run is if individual citizens are allowed to vote on legislation proposed by their representatives, rather than having the representatives do the voting. It would encourage the reps to actually engage their voting populations, otherwise their legislation dies.
Power to the people!
Re:What a concept! (Score:0, Informative)
Re:What a concept! (Score:3, Informative)
That's why we're not a pure democracy but a republic.
Individual people might be smart, but crowds are reactive, mirroring and stupid.
Re:What a concept! (Score:5, Informative)
Some context about Prop. 13's start, IIRC, your property value was not necessarily assessed fairly, and you could be taxed out of your home, the home that you actually owned the deed to. Wikipedia lines up decently, Prop 13 [wikipedia.org].
Like many of the silly things in CA, Prop 13 happened as a reaction to an abuse of power, which of course led to new abuses.
Re:What a concept! (Score:2, Informative)
What the hell does this have to do with China's congress? Everything's about America, isn't it?
One person mischaracterized this survey in China as a vote and offered the hypothesis that direct voting by the population was the way to go. Another person posted a concrete real-world example of where such a thing went wrong, this example happened to come from California. Does that clear things up for you?
Re:What a concept! (Score:4, Informative)
You people ought to really read the Federalist papers, instead of repeating what someone else said. A republic is a form of government where the head of state is not an inherited position. You're actually comparing a direct democracy (the federalist papers never mention a pure democracy) to a representative democracy (the republic in the federalist papers).
Furthermore, the Federalist Papers actually warn explicitly about having too many representatives (which leads to its own form of herd mentality) and having too few representatives per voter (which leads to a distant representative and a clustering of votes around special interests). Yes, we're fucked, but the Founders knew we were going to be fucked no matter what they set up, and merely tried to set things up in such a way that it minimizes the amount of stupid that goes around.
Re:What a concept! (Score:2, Informative)
No, the real problem with prop 13 is that it's a bad solution to the problems it was supposed to solve. The problem was that seniors on fixed incomes were being taxed out of their homes.
This was a short-term problem, since the cost of housing was rising along with inflation in the late 70s and early 80s. Seniors on fixed incomes couldn't handle the increased taxes that came with it.
A proper solution would have been targeted at seniors, and seniors only. They could have had their taxes capped, and the temporary load could have been born by a modest increase in other taxes, or even bonds. Remember--this was a short-term spike due to high inflation.
Instead, they capped taxes on everything including commercial real estate. Initially it's no problem, but 30 years on you have some people paying ridiculously low tax rates while services suffer. But wait, it gets better. Since everybody knows the tax rates are capped, they're willing to pay more for the house. Very few people can buy a house for cash.
Thus, you end up paying more mortgage interest and less taxes. Prop 13 represents a direct transfer of tax revenue to bankers. It's the "3rd rail of CA politics" because bankers will never let go of that revenue stream.
Now. All of this because helping granny stay in her house would have been "socialism". Socialism is looking better and better every day.