With the primary season entering into full gear, we’ve seen a lot of different policy proposals bandied around by the candidates. There’s always a place here for deconstructing the bad proposals, but the wide diversity of ideas pitched has me thinking: what would r/BadEconomics’ platform look like if we ran for president? I think we could put together a platform of well evidenced economic policy proposals of a sort that could command wide respect.

To that end, we’ll be creating the r/BadEconomics Economic Platform and taking submissions from all of you for policy planks to be added to it. Once we develop a substantial enough platform, we’ll list it in the sidebar and keep it up at least until the election is over. We’ll also update it periodically as additional submissions flow in.

If you want to add your policy proposal to the platform, here’s the procedure. Submit a new text post to the subreddit starting with “Policy Proposal:” followed by a succinct title for your proposal. Then, in the text of the post, explain the policy idea and make your case for it, citing strong economic evidence along the way. If the proposal survives the discussion in the submission thread and obtains the approval of the mods, it goes in the platform. Proposals that don't cite any economic literature will, in general, be marked as insufficient.

Note that we really only want economic policy proposals. We’re not going to be hosting big moral debates about social issues or foreign policy or whatever. It’s not that these things aren’t important, but they’re also not really our comparative advantage. I know that to some degree, that sort of thing will be inevitable, but do your best to keep it, uh, technocratic let’s say. Mod fiat will keep any extreme chicanery from entering into the final platform anyway.

So, let’s see what our economic platform will be!