- add two new brackets to capital gains taxes. positions held for more than 5 years pay 5% capital gains taxes, to encourage long term investment. positions held for less than a week pay 50% capital gains taxes, to reduce churn.

- use a shortest splitline algorithm to make congressional districts fair

- lower the voting age to 16.

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1a. Of course the Silicon Valley tech elite want to cut capital gains tax - they already offshore American jobs and American incomes through tax loopholes. This is just the latest in a long line of attempts to escape contributing their fair share to our state and cities. And the candidates suggestion of a week-long tax bracket has no bearing on reality, it will simply increase the complexity for already strained small businesses and make it harder for them to hire and expand our economy.

1b. The candidate has proposed a radical restructuring of our tax system to include time worked at a company - something already accounted for by raises due to hard work - making it expensive for California's workforce to move to better jobs. That sounds un-American to me. The candidate has yet to show a single shred of solid independent evidence that this is even a problem, let alone that he has a solution for it.

2. Here we have a first-time candidate suggesting that we simply redraw the political map of California - again. I'm sure that he and his party won't personally benefit of course. Let's not forget, the Citizens Redistricting Commission just finished their work a couple of years ago on the taxpayer's dollar, and California now has some of the most competitive districts in the nation. We should focus on real issues facing our state, not tweaking lines on a map.

3. America is a great democracy, the greatest the world has seen. We have to make sure we take care of that, and steward it for the future. Lowering the voting age might seem noble, but it opens the floodgates to coercion, to intimidation in schools and homes. We should focus instead on engaging our young people with civic duty and the political process.

I'd read the proposal as "[short/long] positions", not "[job] positions". I'm curious to know which the parent intended.

So, reward the megacapitalists that are most able to hold long term positions, but penalize people who get equity-based compensation (like stock options) that can't afford to hold it long term by taxing it far heavier than even the top rate for regular income?

> use a shortest splitline algorithm to make congressional districts fair

Blind, perhaps, but fair? And, as a federal mandate, replacing the judgements of the citizens of many states --including California, which might be important to consider if you are running to represent California in the Senate -- that have already adopted non-partisan commissions to solve the threat of partisan districting? That's a good way to hurt your chances of getting elected with a proposal that would go over like a lead brick even if you did get elected.

> lower the voting age to 16.

What's the argument for this? Politically, you'd better have a good one, because without it its a good way to threaten to reduce the voting power of the people you are asking to vote for you in order to appeal to people that won't be able to vote for you until after you win, at best.

What I would do on capital gains is end the favored treatment of carried interest; that's income, and should be taxed as such.

Ending jerrymandering, sure. (I'm not sure of the technically best way to do that, but you could make an argument based on territory or some deterministic population metric. The problem is there enough plausible fair deterministic methods which turn out in various ways that the question of which one we use could be a debate. I'd actually like to see an evaluation of sortition instead of election for many roles.

The voting age issue is kind of irrelevant IMO, but in general a push to mail-in ballots (to improve voter turnout) would be good.

Note that the argument that someone younger doesn't really understand the consequences of their actions etc. - whether right or wrong - is severely diminished by a representative system where the candidates must be older, combined with a system where, if, say, the voting age is lowered to 16, the 16 and 17 year olds are extremely unlikely to skew the results so much that the candidates elected end up being someone that isn't also believed to be suitable by a large percentage of 18+ voters. So the potential "damage" if 16 and 17 year olds all decide to vote completely and utterly irrationally is quite limited.

But unless there is concrete evidence that 16 and 17 year olds objectively will make substantially less informed choices in an election than other groups we let vote, why is it any more acceptable to disenfranchise a 16 year old than it was to disenfranchise 18 year olds? Or blacks? Or people who didn't own land?

The burden of proof should be on those who wants the limit set higher to justify, with evidence, why specific groups needs to be/remain disenfranchised.

The major source of political pressure behind the 26th amendment (and, yes, nationally lowering the voting age for all elections takes a Constitutional amendment) was that 18 was the age of conscription and, well, Vietnam.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Voting_ages.png shows that the vast majority of countries have settled on 18 with a handful for 16, 17, 19, 20, 21.

All countries have constraints based on mental competency. The point is that a typical 16 year old (and yes, probably 15 year olds too) are well above the mental capacity where we still allow adults to vote.

The current age limits are not justified with any evidence of that the group is substantially less competent to make the relevant choices than many other subsets of the population that we don't hesitate to allow to vote. If someone for example started arguing for iq tests, or a test on knowledge of current affairs, it would be exceedingly hard to put the barrier low enough to not exclude any enfranchised adults, and you'd almost certainly end up including children well below the age of 16 (e.g. political youth parties in many countries have a lower age of 14, some even lower, and you'll find people in those organisations that are schooled in political science beyond what most adults ever will be).

This would not extend to 1 day old babies because a 1 day old baby lack the ability to make any kind of informed choice. In fact, a 1 day old baby lack the physical ability to observe the alternatives and indicate a choice. They would be excluded by any kind of mental competency standard.

Where exactly to draw the line would be hard, but expect it to drop substantially over time, as it already has.

Here in the UK, politicians often take money from students and young people, while leaving older people untouched or better off - because older people are allowed to vote, and have high voter turnout. I could run with a policy of "I will double university prices to cut taxpayer subsidy... taking effect in three years" and nobody who bore the costs of the policy would be able to vote against it.

Of course, given that the main beneficiaries are people who can't currently vote, the policy might not be a vote-winner.