I have lived experience dealing with selling software to government agencies. I have observed egregious activity, which to my company's government salesmen, didn't cause them to blink an eye. In one case, the DoD budget ran out of money, but the DoD budget for Disabled Veteran purchasing still had money, so we added 10% to the contract and resold through a disabled veteran's LLC, the taxpayer got screwed, the LLC-owner made a 6 figure fee for doing nothing, and we got paid. This, I was told, was literally nothing compared to what else our salesmen had seen! But I was scandalized as an honest 20-something worker bee.

Such a minor case of course. But this is a microcosm of the entire problem. No one cares, no one is incentivized, no one represents the taxpayer. How does a US politician on a $175k salary become worth $80 million after 30 years in congress? The system is rigged, and the majority of the American people see themselves as suckers and are tired of it.

> How does a US politician on a $175k salary become worth $80 million after 30 years in congress?

Which politician are we talking about here? Or are we being generic? From what I've seen, the majority of people in Congress started off rich because, well, you need to be rich (or at least rich-adjacent) to even consider running.

Chuck Schumer, who has been in Congress since 1998 https://www.lawyersclubindia.com/wealth/chuck-schumer-net-wo...

Not wishing to disparage the good name of "lawyersclubindia" and their guesstimates but OpenSecrets has him at just over $1M in 2018[0] and ThisNation has him at $900k in 2022[1]. (Neither sounds that plausible but they are definitely less shady than "lawyersclubindia".)

The only places that have him in the 10s of $M bracket look like spam content farms who've stolen the majority of their content from Wikipedia.

[0] https://www.opensecrets.org/personal-finances/charles-schume...

[1] https://www.thisnation.com/politics/people/chuck-schumer-net...

I posted the comment above yours.

Nowhere did I mention that accountability for government spending is a bad thing or that government spending is not out of control. Especially with military contracts.

Of course we should address overspending. Of course we should have accountability. Of course we should end the brazen insider trading, and end citizens united, and reform campaign financing.

Defunding USAID, defunding Medicare, deregulating profits on medications, defunding NPR etc. are none of these things and we all know it.

The Pentagon has been failing audit after audit. How come we are not starting with that? (Rhetorical question).

Subsidies for industries that don’t need subsidies.

Let’s not pretend that the waste is in the essential historically underfunded services.