Please click this link and read the post ^ it provides a lot of context for what I rant about.
Agreed 100% people will do amazing things when not in dire straights. I simply want to be able to own my own home. Look up Kommunalka and you'll see why I want that.
In the Soviet Union all housing in all cities was owned by the state. Not the individual republic that the city resided in but the Soviet Union itself. People were forced to have others come into their homes and live there with them. If you got a divorce you had to get government approval to move. People would get a divorce and be forced to live together for literal years while they waited for approval from a bloated bureaucracy. I don't want that, I want freedom and control over housing not even less than I do now. Also everyone deserves freedom and control over housing!
Everyone is going to say “BuT tHeRe ArE oThEr SoCiAlIsT StAtEs ThAt ArE sUcCeSsFul!!” Your right there are. Tell me though, how many of them are as large as the United States and Soviet Union? How many of them have the economic potential that the United States and Soviet Union have? How many of them have a majority of their politicians corrupt, power hungry and only want to spend on their military like the United States and the Soviet Union? None of them do. The Soviet Union is commonly used by people in the US as a boogeyman against Socialism because of the Cold War and how badly socialism turned out for them. In reality they are the only state with a comparable population to the US that has tried it. (China doesn't count, they have “special economic zones” where capitalism is allowed and encouraged. They're also very authoritarian and don't allow you to have a disenting opinion.) They had politicians that wanted money and power and were willing to do literally anything to attain and keep it. Note any of Stalin's or Mao's purges.
When you start a Socialist economic plan you bring in more money to the government than any other modern economic ideology. This attracts the greedy and power hungry to come into power and bankrupt the state with horrible spending policy and nepotistic promoting habits. This is a real possibility and no form of economic plan is immune to it. It happened in the Soviet Union and China. Considering the United States political and budgetary landscape this would probably happen. We already have greedy power hungry politicians and we already have bad spending habits. Putting the increased economic power that socialism affords into the same hands that got us where we are today would only make the problem worse.
Socialism scares many Americans because it restricts certain individual freedoms in hopes of providing everyone what they need and news flash, China and the Soviet Union still have poor people and homeless people. Socialism means trusting in the government to provide you with what you need in terms of food, housing and jobs. For many Americans asking them to accept Socialism is like asking them to accept the loss of the few freedoms they have and for them to trust the very government they distrust to provide it for them. In today's America true socialism will not work.
If you want Socialism to truly work for Americans, and not the other way around, it has to be gradually implemented.
-Start with getting rid of the IRS and the ridiculous tax code that can land you in jail. Replace it with a European style of tax collection where the gov' takes exactly what you owe them from your paycheck, not a penny more or a penny less, and skip the refund checks. The whole process we have now is actually quite expensive to the tax payer and has literally no benefits for them.
-Close out tax loopholes on the wealthy. I know you want to eat the rich but they have enough money to kill your movement in its cradle so you have to sneak up on them. If you want to get them to pay what they really owe then it's gonna be a slow push. Rome wasn't build in a day and neither are successful tax reforms.
-After that you move on to centralized Healthcare. Why not Healthcare first? How is a bankrupt country going to pay for it unless it stabilizes its income? What should we define centralized Healthcare as? Well nobody will need insurance, no more paperwork yay!! When you go to the doctor you pay a $25 fee and you cap out at $350 a year in fees, end of story no more discussion needed.
-After Healthcare reform you implement a heavily regulated housing market. One where nobody can make money on the rent payed to them. Rent should be no more than the landlord needs to cover mortgage and real estate tax. The landlord's income from using residential property as an investment tool should come from the increase in the value of the property exclusively. Dropping rent so that it covers these costs reduces cost of living significantly. It would make renting for life a financially viable option as you spend the same monthly as you do when you own a home without the initial upfront payment, it also means you don't pay anything in maintenance, that still falls on the landlord. A housing board would be created to determine if a building is suitably up to date for rent. If it's not the landlord either does not rent it or makes the changes needed so they can.
-If you own a commercial building then yes, you can charge more than your loan payments and yearly property tax in rent. If somebody is using something you own for the purpose of making money then you should be able to make some cash too.
-After that we get spending under control. To do that we cut military spending drastically while undergoing talks with our allies encouraging them to slightly increase their military spending so the total military power of our “group” does not plummet and encourage Russia and China to push around whoever they want. You may not like it but there are still countries out there that covet their neighbors land, the war in Ukraine has highlighted that. These smaller nations need to be protected, not by one overbearingly powerful military but by the entire free community. Full stop. We should not police the world, but that doesn't mean we, along with our allies, can't help on situations like Ukraine. If this can be accomplished then we've just freed up a majority of out budget.
From here we can start to pay back out debt and get out of the red. As well as spending a much merger percentage of our budget on social programs to lift people out of poverty by providing them will education and provide them with jobs through public building projects (ahem, Hoover Dam). The bullet points listed above are outrageously ambitious yes. If it sounds like this list can't be accomplished then I have some bad news for you because they also fall very short of real Socialism. Real Socialism can't be enacted overnight, it also cannot be enacted by one presidential administration, even if it is 8 years long. It also cannot be enacted with the United States current political climate. Publicly funded elections along with strick and enforced anti-corruption laws are a pre-requisite for this list and for real working Socialism. In the United States there's another pre-requisite, the purging (in a strictly non-violent fashion) of every single politician in office. Sorry, but if you help office before you cannot hold office anymore regardless of your political leanings.
If you want America to be Socialist then you can't put the cart before the horse. That would land the US with an authoritarian regime similar to the Soviet Union and China. Socialism has to be done slowly because those opposed to it also have the power to stop it. You have to slowly chip away at that power. Anything worth doing (and Socialism is) is worth doing right, especially when doing it wrong has drastic consequences.
(Sorry for any errors that I missed. This has been a VERY long post and I did it on my phone 😛 so please cut me some slack)