8 ms·
Such a cheap bribe holy crap.
by grandpoobah 11mo ago
Such a cheap bribe holy crap.
- codeddesign 11mo ago[flagged]
- epistasis 11mo ago> Don’t be an idiot. ... failed worse than the Obamacare rollout This is a very rude and inappropriate way to deliver your misinformation. The program was hugely popular and successfull
- vjvjvjvjghv 11mo agoWhen you look at the donations politicians receive and the ROI they produce you quickly realize that they are way too cheap. Politicians should ask for way more money so lobbying is not that incredibly profitable.
- latexr 11mo ago> Politicians should ask for way more money so lobbying is not that incredibly profitable. Except those corrupt politicians want lobbying to be profitable, so they can profit from it too. And if they ask for too much, they’ll just bribe the next guy or may even try to put their own in office. Can’t have that!
- c0balt 11mo agoHealthy competition, the free market has resolved the issues of overpriced bribes. /s
- potato3732842 11mo agoI'm surprised that politicians haven't established burdensome and expensive professional compliance and licensure requirements for their own trade to restrict upstart competition. Every other trade pays them to implement the same so it's not like they're not familiar with how to do it.
- nerdponx 11mo agoNo need: campaign financing, low turnout, and incumbent bias are all substantial barriers to entry.
- gigatree 11mo agoAh yes, the free market
- cogman10 11mo agoEspecially since they so often land jobs for themselves and their kids with the people that lobby them. Kirsten Sinema got a job as a senior lobbiest after her short congressional stint.
- nerdponx 11mo agoSynema is a particularly fun example because you can tell where her loyalties laid from her voting record.
- eru 11mo agoCompare https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in-almonds/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in... and https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tech-pacs-are-closing-in-on-the-almonds https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tech-pacs-are-closing-in-on...
- nerdponx 11mo agoThe individual bribes aren't the whole picture. The bribes are statements of loyalty. If I am reliably donating to your campaign every couple of years, then I am probably not donating to your opponents' campaigns. And loyalty seems particularly important with the current administration, because they have an agenda full of things that are illegal or otherwise unsavory and un-American, so they need a nation run by loyal henchmen if the agenda is to succeed.
- cbgb2 11mo agoMaybe lobbyists should be punished by having their skin fully tattooed blue like smurfs. This way, you’d have to really be into lobbying to suffer the tattoo pain and permanent branding.
- foxglacier 11mo agoOr voters should take some civic responsibility and stop voting for corrupt politicians. Americans seem to be either unable to make their own decisions without paid advertising to direct them or they're afraid of "wasting" their vote on candidates that didn't spend enough on advertising.
- mptest 11mo agothis is just a more abstract "bootstraps" argument. schooling in this country has been systematically attacked and deconstructed, and as the burger reich's leader says, "i love the poorly educated". this is not "dum timmy votes for dum thing" it's "countless $ and effort and man hours have been devoted to making the american populace dumber" Why? look at any polling breakdown for how the educated vote vs the uneducated.
- whoooboyy 11mo agoTry telling people you voted third party because of a deeply held conviction about not electing corrupt politicians. You will be told you are evil, that you've got an unreasonable/impossible purity bar, that you don't really believe in that deeply held moral conviction actually, that you are worse than the people who voted for the other guy, that you are a utopian idealist, etc etc. Don't get me wrong, I did vote third party and I will continue to do so if the Dems put up candidates like Harris and Biden. But don't expect most people to be willing to weather the storm of vitriol they'll receive for holding a high bar for their politicians.
- petralithic 11mo agoIt's more that voting third party in a first-past-the-post voting scheme is systemically pointless.
- com2kid 11mo agoI am surprised no one has started a go fund me to make a fund just to bribe politicians to fix tax filing. It would be cost effective VS paying for tax prep!
- vkou 11mo agoJon Oliver tried his best to bribe Clarence Thomas, but unfortunately, the prick turns out to only be for sale to one side. You might run into similar problems.
- kgwxd 11mo agoeconomies of scale, he's just being a smart businessman.
- sobkas 11mo ago> I am surprised no one has started a go fund me to make a fund just to bribe politicians to fix tax filing. > > It would be cost effective VS paying for tax prep! It will not work, part of compensation is being hired as lobbyist after you "retire" from public office. So either go fund me will do the same or it will fail.
- com2kid 11mo ago> It will not work, part of compensation is being hired as lobbyist after you "retire" from public office. So either go fund me will do the same or it will fail. This is a bit reductive. Not everyone member of Congress goes to work for TurboTax after they retire! However I imagine Inuit is a reliable source of campaign contributions every year. The simple solution is to get enough funding that the campaign can promise 3 or 4 election cycles of support for any politicians that vote in favor of tax filing reform.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 11mo agoThere's no guarantee this doesn't simply make the bribe more expensive for Intuit.
- passwordoops 11mo agoMost bribes are