My family used to be in the paint business, and when we were cleaning out a storage space in the old family store back in the early 1980s we found containers of blackout cement paint designed to prevent light from getting out and make sure windows didn’t shatter into dangerous shards from blasts.
During WWII, the skylights in the State Capitol in Albany, NY were covered with blackout shades, and they forgot about it, only finally remembering and uncovering them in the 2010s.
Factoring in income, payroll, corporate, and other taxes, those in the top 10% of income pay an average 27% tax rate. That’s the highest tax rate of all the deciles. That same top 10% earned 52.6% of all income but paid 75.8% of all income taxes.
That ratio of taxes to income of 1.44 is the highest among developed countries; the United States actually has the most progressive tax system among developed countries.
It meets the standard of one-person, one-vote in each state, and in the Electoral College, no elector’s vote counts more or less than any other elector’s.
Your problem with the Electoral College is rooted in the notion that presidents should be chosen by nationwide popular vote, but the Founders didn’t think that, and I agree with them. In 2016 Clinton’s popular vote advantage came entirely from California. The Founders knew that kind of thing could happen, and they didn’t think it would be healthy for the republic for presidents to be able to win by running up the score in a single state or section; they feared it would foster destructive sectionalism, and so for that reason (among others) they crafted a mechanism that would favor candidate who had widespread support across the nation.
If my vote didn’t matter in choosing the president, it was because of the winner-take-all way New York awards electors and the fact that the Democrats have been a lock to get a majority in New York for the last three decades. But that’s on how New York chooses its electors, not the Electoral College itself.
Each state gets a number of electors equal to how many representatives and senators they have.The state legislature decides how electors are awarded; most states say whichever candidate wins the popular vote in the state gets all the electors.After the popular vote takes place in November, each state’s electors meet in that state’s capital and vote for president and vice-president.Whoever gets a majority of the electoral vote (currently, a majority is at least 270), becomes president.
How much do they charge for that buffet?