It’s Not That Hard

After my recent trip to Estonia, I realized that finding common ground to America’s thorniest political issues could be easier than we all think

I was in Estonia last week. Estonia is the only country that has internet voting (a close cousin to the mobile voting system we’re trying to implement here). Because most of what they know about U.S. government and politics comes from mainstream media, social media, blogs and podcasts, they assume — naturally — that Americans must be deeply divided on every issue. That we can’t agree on anything and there’s no common ground to solve our problems. Why else would we possibly fight so much? 

I assured them that was not true. And then took it a step further with the exercise below. My guess is you will agree with most of the solutions below to ten of society’s most “controversial” issues. You may find yourself at the extreme of a few of them, but overall, my guess is that you, me and the vast majority of Americans could live with this approach. But of course, because we decide almost every election in the primary (thank you gerrymandering) and because primary turnout is mainly just the extremes, we never actually solve any of these issues. 

Empowering regular people so they can overcome the influence and power of the extremes is the challenge. Actually finding common ground to solve our problems isn’t that hard. Take a look. 

Immigration: Don’t let in people who don’t have a visa, protect the borders, asylum should be limited to extreme cases, expand legal immigration to the needs of the economy and to properly fund Social Security and Medicare and let the Department of Labor or the Fed set immigration targets by industry and skill set based on the needs of the economy. 

Guns: Don’t confiscate everyone’s guns and don’t make it easy to walk into a store and walk out with an assault rifle. Hunters should be able to get what they need. Machine guns shouldn’t be readily available. 

Taxes: Rich people should pay their fair share but it should not be punitive just because they are rich (which most people aspire to). Get rid of all of the loopholes that let everyone cheat the system and adjust the rates to only exactly what you need to efficiently run the government without putting the needs of public sector unions or special interests or pork projects first.

Education: Just give kids the best education you can based on whatever actually works. If traditional public schools are doing a great job, go with the status quo. If not, try charters, vouchers, school choice. Don’t put the interests of the adults in the system ahead of kids. And don’t let kids go hungry.

Energy: Climate change is obviously real. Use new technology to mitigate it (green energy and different ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere). Don’t raise taxes and costs on regular people to do it — just help create markets for it to make it economically sustainable. 

Foreign conflicts: Support democracies around the world and support countries whose interests are strategic to the U.S with weapons and money. But American soldiers should only be deployed in extreme cases where U.S. safety is explicitly at risk.

Trade: Where other countries are discriminating against specific American countries and industries, demand those policies be changed and if not, impose retaliatory tariffs against those countries. But otherwise, don’t raise consumer prices by adding more cost to every imported product. 

Tech regulation (AI, autonomous, social media, drones, etc): We want the US to be the hub of innovation but that can’t come at the expense of everyone’s safety, mental health and well being. Use the right regulations to balance the ability to create new technology against the health and safety of regular people and stop making it an all or nothing proposition (tech isn’t inherently evil and regulations aren’t inherently bad).

Housing: Stop making it so hard to build housing that people can actually afford to live in. Don’t let the extremes on either side — environmentalists, NIMBY community activists, unions, developers — put their needs ahead of giving people reasonable places to live. 

Health care: Make some version of affordable health care available to everyone but that doesn’t mean everyone has to have the same health care either. Have a government option for people who can’t get health care at work and don’t qualify for Medicare or Medicaid. And asking able-bodied people to work before they receive Medicaid is not unreasonable.

These are just ten of many issues we could cover. And yes, the devil is in the details. But if politicians were electorally incentivized to actually deliver solutions rather than find excuses to prevent change simply because that’s what their base wants (and only their base matters electorally), they’d figure most of it out. No one would be happy with every policy in every bill, but that’s the sign of a good negotiation — everyone is a little disgruntled but they can mainly live with the result. 

Finding common ground is not that hard. Agreeing on it politically shouldn’t be either. Estonia did it. We can too.