6 ms·
Why don't we just pay lawmakers $1M a year, or maybe more? The fact that a lawmaker is impressed by a nice dinner or a basketball game is embarrassing.
by jeffdavis 11y ago
Why don't we just pay lawmakers $1M a year, or maybe more?
The fact that a lawmaker is impressed by a nice dinner or a basketball game is embarrassing.
- learc83 11y agoThey're not. Lobbyists are breaking federal law if they take a congressman out to a nice dinner. Paying them more wouldn't solve this problem because running an election campaign is so expensive that they spend the majority of their time trying to raise money. They end up taking positions that are friendly to potential donors in the hope that the donors will keep sending them money. The major problem isn't that they trade favors to lobbyists to enrich themselves directly (although some undoubtedly are), the problem is that they trade favors to lobbyists in order to keep getting re-elected.
- ljf 11y agoSo should we pay them less maybe, so that only those that care about politics run? Or does that leave them more open to bribery? A complex problem to solve!
- raquo 11y agoThe problem seems to be that a slightly indirect variation of bribery (aka lobbying) has been legalized in the first place, not that such bribery is hard to detect. If there was any political will to solve this problem, it would have been solved long ago.
- FireBeyond 11y agoRight, so what happens instead is the lobbyist donates some money to the campaign, and the campaign takes them out to dinner, where they can talk about future campaign funding. And that's totally legal.
- learc83 11y agoYeah that happens, but they're trading favors for continued campaign contributions not free dinners, so paying them more money isn't going to fix anything. Forcing all interactions with lobbyists to be recorded and released might help. Publicly funded campaigns would also probably solve this problem (but could also cause its own problems).