If I could wave a magic wand and change things, here's what I would do:
1. Increase pay for senators by 10x, and for congresspeople by 5x.
2. Institute term limits, maximum of 4 consecutive terms.
3. After leaving office, total ban on direct employment of any kind for a period of time equal to the time spent in office. During this 'freeze' period, give them a pension equal to their pay while in office.
4. Strict limits on the nature of employment allowed for spouses/children/close relatives.
5. Strict limits on volunteer/nonprofit work, board positions, and anything else that isn't direct employment.
6. Lifetime ban on political lobbying.
7. Ban on any investing outside of a blind trust for the duration of their time in office plus the duration of the 'freeze'.
Overall, my thesis is that we should take away as much as possible of the opportunity and the incentive for corruption for the purpose of financial gain. We do that by paying officials gobs of money and preventing them from participating in the system outside of their defined role as a government official.
Otherwise totally agree. I'd even go so far as to say permanent ban on any employment with a step down salary/pension for life, halving with each multiple of the time in office.
Sure one can (theoretically, this is just not going to fly in practice because those who are already in power won't let it happen) prohibit direct employment and other official forms of affiliation, but it would be hard to prohibit receiving gifts, talking with good friends, getting invitations and so on. Yes, you can list such things, and let judges review it, but humans are creative and there always will be loopholes.
You only want people as politicians because they feel it's their civic duty to serve their countrymen, not because it's a lucrative career.
The upshot of this is that when “the people” get pissed and start saying things like “Don’t pay congress until they fix the government shutdown!”, it unilaterally screws anyone who was working or middle class prior to election, as they now have no salary and can’t hold out as long as the multi-millionaire politicians who have a law firm back home or a huge stock portfolio paying their rent.
The idea that, under the current system, people are running for congress for the money isn’t exactly in line with how things currently operate.
Just don't elect them. When running for office in most places, being considered wealthy or coming from a wealthy family is a considerable hurdle to overcome (as is being extremely poor).
I wouldn’t call it a major hurdle. Many voters have inconsistent beliefs: They may think wealth is a sign of virtue and hard work during campaign season and then start saying “cut congressional salaries!” when they get angry, not realizing that they voted for people who are insulated from the very tactic they are pushing. It’s not enough to just say “well then don’t elect them”, we need to make sure the system of incentives we’ve created doesn’t funnel towards bad outcomes.
We also want successful, competent people to enter politics and we should not be giving them reasons to avoid it, such as forcing them to sacrifice their financial freedom and success.
Also, there is a very clear correlation between low legislator pay and corruption in other countries. Let's not make bribes and kickbacks more attractive by taking away other options politicians have for building wealth.
This is how America got rid of large swaths of police corruption. Go back 100 years and bribing police was trivial, they made so little money that taking bribes was how they kept afloat financially.
Now days? An officer making $120k a year isn't going to take a $100 bribe to let a drunk driver go free.
In our current political system a politician has no accountability for accepting favors or campaign funds. There is no accountability for passing bad laws or being corrupt. This behavior will continue regardless of the base salary, or at least until there are repercussions against it. Currently there are none.
Hell, even today that's still the case in many countries with a large number of underpaid public servants - specifically China, where extorting bribes is considered a perk of the job.
Contrast to Singapore, which pays its members of parliament 3x the median household income and is tied for second place on the (lowest) Corruption Perception Index.
Also what does "make corruption illegal" even mean? Corruption takes many forms, and there will always be loopholes through which the most savvy can escape legal repercussions. I would much rather structure things so not being corrupt is just the easier, better, more natural choice. That's also not easy, but sounds more achievable to me.
1. The selfless (or the insane or crazy activists) 2. The rich 3. The corrupt
When you pay people a lot you also get
4. Competent hard working people who aren't necessarily selfless. (this is most people)
This group of people makes up the vast majority of people in the US, so why not have some of those people represent us.
And that's where sortition (vote by lottery) is probably the best system, combined with a way to vote to remove and "Redo lottery".
Whomever is elected by lottery would be provided a "unswayable" amount of money, basically buying corruption away. They would be set for their life.
A lottery of all eligible citizens would also have secondary effects of encouraging high education across the whole populace, so that when Joe or Jane Doe is selected, they do a good job for the citizens.
Why? I mean you just say that as if it's some universal truth. I don't see how focusing on civic duty is any better as a way to find good candidates than optimizing for high achieving people looking for lucrative fields to work on. I don't know which would yield better results but none is better by default in my view unless you have some romantic view of what politics should be, rather than what it is, a job.
Being dependent on their salary for their lifestyle would make them more in touch than the current "use the power of the office to make money via alternative means" situation.
That sounds great. I agree in principle.
However, I believe the parent is asserting that in practice, the kinds of people who are competent and able to effectively manage a large organization are the kinds of people that can make a lot of money in the private sector, and thus only go into public office if it is lucrative anyway.
Should it be lucrative because they can get bought by special interests, or should it be more lucrative simply because they get compensated above board more?
Perhaps someone who makes a million dollars a year would be someone less likely to be corrupted by a few more campaign dollars and kickbacks than someone making $170k.
So pay them less in the private sector as well. Our willingness to accept people hoarding unlimited wealth and power because "capitalism" while seeking to limit government as much as possible is a perverse incentive that's leading the US to becoming an oligarchy. If we're not willing or able to raise the quality of life for the poor, then bring everyone else down a notch or two.
President's pay comes with housing so my family could probably make that work, would be belt tightening--especially because I'd be on the hook for the food in state dinners and such.
Not that I think anyone wants me to be a senator or the president but rather I couldn't afford to be. I'm too wealthy for it to be an upgrade and too poor to take the pay cuts in stride.
When you're a senator, you also receive a lot of "perks" that reduce your overall expenses. Most travel comes out of an office fund, hotels, rental cars... many meals can also be expensed to the same fund, etc. Clothing even in some cases.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salaries_of_members_of_the_Uni...
Also, presidents don't pay for state dinners out of their salaries. The - state - pays for it.
Something that makes it hard for rich people to represent poor people without losing some wealth seems great to me.
So, they can't own a home in a location they represent? I don't see that going over well. Your primary home is real estate. So is that little family cottage.
Also, congressional reps need to have a home is Washington. So, they have to rent there?
After all it is positioning real estate as investments that contribute to its unaffordability.
That said, I don't think real estate is as easily abused as stocks. Much harder to influence the value.
They could always try renting. A lot of people manage to get by doing just that.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2013/12/04/politics/real-alpha-house/ind...
If their kids accept their inheritance, the rules apply to them too. The rules always apply to spouses.
Let them invest in whole-market funds / ETFs, but only allow withdrawls 5 years after leaving office.
We're a capitalist society. That doesn't mean "let companies do whatever they want, including buying politicians", it means "we use capital as a means of setting incentives to drive good outcomes". Let's use our capital incentives correctly to drive good outcomes from our elected leaders. They work for us.
Call me insane I guess.
Do you really want people greedier than that running the country?
I don't think rewarding certain behaviors like sponsoring is good, because its too easily abused. When a KPI becomes a target, its no longer a KPI.
There are probably 2 or 3 orders of magnitude too many laws currently in America (have you ever estimated trying to read and comprehend the entire law? Borderline impossible in a single lifetime even under very optimistic reading-speed assumptions etc).
If this metric becomes a target and ceases to be a good metric, that sounds ideal because it'll have the side effect of drastically simplifying the legal code.
To be blunt, your whole polemic reads like a CATO fever dream, which is the opposite of what I was suggesting; ideological contrivance isn't a solve, and complexity at a nation our size and scope ain't gonna get reduced to a nice pamphlet of rules. It's the same reason you can't run a FAANG company the same way you run a 6 person A-round company.
Bonuses and promotions always go to those who exceed them, and "improvement plans" or "restructuring" is reserved to those who miss.
Any imperfect measure that becomes a target gets pursued at the expense of the original intent.
I'm open to disallowing real estate speculation.
Is there any data to back that up? Because it seems to me like people are falling all over themselves and saying all kinds of crazy shit just to get into office. It looks to me like we have the opposite problem - certain kinds of people CRAVE this power and attention and will do anything to get it.
As you mentioned, people love power. But there is a very, very thin slice of the population that has the ability to run for a federal office.
Clearly we can't pay lawmakers $0 and expert high effort + no corruption.
is there any proof of any way that saying pay from 170k a year to ??? 1 million USD? a year would have any impact on the problems?
Do countries with less corrupt lawmakers pay more than the US? I doubt that...
If lobbying is legal, than bribes should be too.
I'd chip into the "Pay Manchin a ransom of $50M to not do $50T of damage to the planet" fund.
Also selling your vote. Then we can at least choose the pol who sends the biggest check.
Certainly that's not solely due to how they are paid, but I'm sure it factors in.
3 of that is a rounding error from what our reps are currently paid.
Not sure what that argument is going?
No, it's not. Median household income is about $67k. Median salary (or, at least “median annual earnings for workers who worked full time”) is about $56k.
This assumes ones level of corruption has to do with income. Is that true or are there other factors?
The current pay is more than enough. If anything, it could be extended beyond the term to guarantee quarantine periods between office and businesses.
Allowing stock trading is insane. Allowing the amount of campaign money currently circulating is also insane. Provide candidates with campaign funds and limit spending, so they can’t be indebted to corporations once in office.
Basically: just look at some country where politicians aren’t just racing around raising money, and ask “what’s done there and can the same be done in the US?”. This is the that-would-never-work-here thing again.
I think that the people I pay to write laws and run a large organization should have...substantial understanding and skill concerning the relation of the structure and content of law to it's pragmatic effects and the practicalities of running large organizations.
Why would I want anything else?
Do I want more diversity of choices? Sure, I want diversity of meaningful policy preference options that would result from having an electoral system that favored proportionality (which is pretty much the best pragmatic definition of representative democracy) rather than duopoly.
Congress passes laws. They aren't supposed to pass a vague law and then hand over the actual rule-making to unelected government bureaucracies.
The House is the people's house. Each Representative represents some relatively equal number of constituents. The Senate is the States' house. The state legislatures sends senators. The Senators represent the interests of their State.
We jiggered with this, and this is how rich people and corporations can influence so much of what goes on. The original system encourages accountability.
> hand over the actual rule-making to unelected government bureaucracies.
Are you referring to the judicial branch? Isn't that the system laid out in the founding docs?
> We jiggered with this
What jiggering are you referring to?
Without understanding your point, I'm all for this legislation as we've seen so many recent US officials enrich themselves with the power they wield.
No, I'm talking about the executive branch agencies. An example would be, Congress passes a protected species act; they empower the EPA to regulate how this protected species act is enforced; the EPA makes policy of how the protected species act is enforced.
This isn't completely insane, as it's a complicated process. But in actuality, what happens is the EPA becomes a revolving door for special interests ("I worked at the EPA for 5 years, and now I'm head of Environmental Quality at BP!"), corporations "encourage" lawmakers to carve out exceptions in the law that help or protect the corporations, and the agency in general can be used as a weapon to selectively reward or punish people or companies while the ones who could be held accountable--the Congressional lawmakers--can wash their hands of all responsibility. ("It's the EPA, I didn't take away your farm because they found a mushroom species that's protected.")
You're right that edge cases are hard. But the current paradigm of "enact sweeping reforms through vague legislation, and leave the details up to underpaid, overworked, and possibly ideological civil servants who can never be fired in any practical way" isn't sustainable. We know what happens, because it has happened.
Legislators participate in the revolving door policy, too. They do favors for corporate sponsors, and later they get a job there, or with a lobbying group that is funded by corporate sponsors, or with some other back-scratching deal. While doing something about insider trading is a good thing, that's not the real problem, and it feels to me that something like this is more like a bone thrown to keep the yapping dog quiet.
I think they mean executive agencies like the FDA, FCC, EPA, etc. These agencies make rules that effectively carry the force of law. For example, the BATFE is (in)famous for arbitrarily changing their rules to criminalize things they don't like, with no new mandate from the legislature. These rules are effectively laws, because if you break them, you can go to jail for many years.
> We jiggered with this
I think they are referring to the 17th Amendment to the US Constitution, which made it so Senators are elected by the people instead of selected by state legislatures.
Congress in many respects has abdicated it lawmaking authority to the Executive by creating administrative agencies. Violating agency rules will not land you in a court with a jury of your peers as required by the Constitution either. You will end up in a court run by the accusing agency with a judge appointed by the agency. But hey, they aren't laws just rules with criminal and financial penalties for violating them.
The real solution is to actually tackle the corruption it self (as proposed by OP).
The reality is simple: Official pay is irrelevant. It's the system itself that helps or harms, and most countries are plutocracies.
People aren't paid while campaigning, and the US campaign "season" has grown to ridiculous length. It's not realistic to work some other job while doing it anymore (unless that job is being a member of congress), so it has become quite expensive.
At the very least, I don't see a problem with blind trusts or only investing in broad index funds and in a specific trading window. Politicians should be able to invest for retirement like everyone else.
We need people who truly want to make a difference and take pride in the outcomes of their work. I'm thinking of the likes of "founding fathers" who came out of turmoil and persecutions to build something better. They knew they ain't going back to the shit they came from and they carried that forward for several generations. We no longer have that craving to do better. It's been long-lost during decades of enormous prosperity and chill lives. Our problems are miniscule in comparison to what they once were.
So now, we have people who don't give a shit about anything except for their iPhones and daily celeb videos on TikTok. It's this lack of curiosity and any kind of knowledge about the state of things from general population is how you end up with greedy sociopaths running everything in politics. This country needs a decade of actual turmoil to wake everyone up out of their idle stupor. Nothing will change until everyone is fed up and craving for normalcy. In other words - we're kind of doomed.
If the US was a company, there'd be no question that we'd need to pay our leadership much better to attract top talent. We pay senators $170k a year to manage our country with a $20 trillion economy.
So what we end up with is activists who crave power and elites from rich families for whom $170k a year is a rounding error. Those families then use the power from being in office to enrich their families even more.
One solution could be to double or triple pay for US representatives along with banning stock trading and things like "speaking fees."