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The problem in many California towns, including mine, is that the public employee unions (particularly the fire and police) give huge amounts of campaign contri

The problem in many California towns, including mine, is that the public employee unions (particularly the fire and police) give huge amounts of campaign contributions to city politicians, who then turn around and give those unions everything they ask for. We even had a consultant come in and tell us we could easily cut our fire department in half, but nope: they instead got a new emergency center. Median salary for them is about $150K.

bunderbunder 8y ago
That seems to be a ubiquitous problem. I had a bit of a consciousness-raising moment when a friend of mine ran for public office a decade or so back, and shared his experiences with me. The calculus is simple: Nobody really wants to pay out of pocket for the campaign costs, if they can even afford to in the first place, and public donations alone aren't going to cut the mustard, either. So, if you want to play, apparently the very first thing you do is go and talk to the different interest groups in town. Labor unions are an option, but so are philanthropists with significant business interests. They'll happily scratch your back, but only if you promise to scratch theirs. So, that's not even really your first day at work in public office, it's more your first round job interview. The incorruptible need not apply. There have been various attempts at doing something about it over time, but there's a precedent in Constitutional law that money is effectively a form of speech, so serious efforts typically founder on the First Amendment.
- sjg007 8y ago
  maybe political candidates should have gofundme campaigns..
- i_am_nomad 8y ago
  I would recommend Larry Lessig's "Republic: Lost," which is an excellent dissection of the problem and proposes a few actual solutions. Unfortunately, one of the solutions at the federal level is a Constitutional convention. This is possibly the exact worst time in our nation's history to stage one of those.
  - kaibee 8y ago
    > This is possibly the exact worst time in our nation's history to stage one of those. It seems that that kind of comes with the territory, no? You don't have a Constitutional convention when everything's going great.

bunderbunder 8y ago

That seems to be a ubiquitous problem. I had a bit of a consciousness-raising moment when a friend of mine ran for public office a decade or so back, and shared his experiences with me. The calculus is simple: Nobody really wants to pay out of pocket for the campaign costs, if they can even afford to in the first place, and public donations alone aren't going to cut the mustard, either. So, if you want to play, apparently the very first thing you do is go and talk to the different interest groups in town. Labor unions are an option, but so are philanthropists with significant business interests. They'll happily scratch your back, but only if you promise to scratch theirs. So, that's not even really your first day at work in public office, it's more your first round job interview. The incorruptible need not apply. There have been various attempts at doing something about it over time, but there's a precedent in Constitutional law that money is effectively a form of speech, so serious efforts typically founder on the First Amendment.

sjg007 8y ago
maybe political candidates should have gofundme campaigns..
i_am_nomad 8y ago
I would recommend Larry Lessig's "Republic: Lost," which is an excellent dissection of the problem and proposes a few actual solutions. Unfortunately, one of the solutions at the federal level is a Constitutional convention. This is possibly the exact worst time in our nation's history to stage one of those.
- kaibee 8y ago
  > This is possibly the exact worst time in our nation's history to stage one of those. It seems that that kind of comes with the territory, no? You don't have a Constitutional convention when everything's going great.