This system just isn't working. Time for something new.

Honestly, I feel like it makes more sense for cities to band together, rather than states, since the divide is really more urban/rural -- so feel free to join our nation of cities :)

We should really be our own country.

Don't worry about that one -- instead, you should just start a new country somewhere that all of the smart people can move to.

Not paying taxes is difficult. This is the best I've come up with at collectively not paying taxes (basically we pay our taxes, but they pass through a state-controlled office before being released, or not). It's still of course risky, but there would be a large number of people not paying

It's a hard thing to do, since we individually pay taxes, but I've thought something along these lines (I'm a Californian, but I could see more states trying to do something similar). It's not without risks, but perhaps a path forward:

liloqi.com/more-thought...

The west coast states should pool our money together (tax ourselves a little bit more at the state level) and fund our own CDC, along with other agencies of importance. Let's move forward without the red states.

Let's just snag Oregon and Washington and go our own way...

Imagine what we could do if we could keep more Californian money in California, or with like-minded states that want to continue to push forward and create a better society.

It's a shame America is holding California back

This isn't how taxes work, but I do wonder if there are ways to do this:

Love these. It seems like a good opportunity for on-the-job training for those in the construction trades. It seems like there could be a lot more collaboration between cities and trade schools and colleges to work together.

Good steps. I so want to be able to walk for a cup of coffee without having to step around people passed out on the sidewalk in their own filth. We need to do better as a society and address the many variables that contribute to this issue.

Hard to do, since we all send our taxes individually, but these were my random thoughts on how to do this: liloqi.com/more-thought...

I like this move! And it's such a strange concept, using the National Guard to do good things. How odd.

Can we create a "California Office of Federal Tax Payment", where my federal taxes are routed through before the state forwards them on to the feds (instead of me directly paying the federal government)? That way we could collectively withhold our taxes together.

I didn't say anything about "people can govern themselves" (you've started to build a strawman here). I just said we should perhaps let things collapse so we can build things in a different, better way, which is vastly different than what you're misrepresenting my comment as.

I'm not really buying this argument honestly. I'd say it's collapsing currently, and has been for 10, maybe 15 years, if not longer. As things collapse, we can rebuild in different ways (for instance, as CDC funding is stripped, California or a group of blue states could rebuild those on our own).

Still a 44% approval rating. All of the sane people in the country need to always remember this. How do you build a good society when such a staggering portion of the population is on board with the current state of things? I think we need to find a way to move forward without them.