6 ms·

I think the solution is to pay them more, create very strict laws around insider trading, and enforce those laws vigorously. I don't know if that's realistic o

• someguyiguess 11mo ago
  Somehow I don’t think paying them more is going to be a very popular idea among the citizenry.
  • tokai 11mo ago
    It also wouldn't help anything.
    • esafak 11mo ago
      Not unless you combine it with outlawing trading for them.
    • jobs_throwaway 11mo ago
      Yes it would. It'd make Congress a viable career path for ambitious-but-not-yet-wealthy people. Currently, you have to already be rich to be able to make it work. Public service should be a viable path to wealth for ambitious, capable young people.
      • throwaway2037 11mo ago
        There are lots of members of Congress who are not wealthy. (The senate is another story.) AOC was broke the first time that she won a seat.
  • dr_dshiv 11mo ago
    They should benchmark to early USA and Singapore and corporations. George Washington was paid 4x Trump, I believe. In the context of corruption cleanup, I think people understand that paying people well avoids corruption. Mexican cops, that sort of thing. Yes, not popular, but important.
  • hypeatei 11mo ago
    I agree, but the substance of the issue is that their pay has remained the same since 2009 at $174k/year (i.e. not kept up with inflation at all) so if we want to discourage corrupt behavior then giving them a proper salary is probably a good idea if we're going to restrict other methods of building wealth.
    • salawat 11mo ago
      I beg your pardon, but if that applies to Congresspeople, what about the common laborer? All I'm seeing is more pandering to those in a position of power.
      • hypeatei 11mo ago
        The common laborer doesn't control the thing that has a monopoly on violence (the government)
        • salawat 11mo ago
          Neither does Congress. Only it's funding. Still does not answer my question. Good of goose, good of gander. If the secret to a "well behaved and ethical" Congress person is more money, then please point out and explain why in the fuck I can't executives or corporations elbow deep in sketchy shit. All I see is the more money can be accrued faster, the less ethical the population a position attracts. Further, if higher wages really were that much of a miracle cure for better performing people, I'd expect to see more profit sharing with employees, whereas I typically see the exact opposite. Wherein an inordinate amount of executive effort is spent trying to maximize information asymmetry, and divide and conquering labor in terms of value extraction from them.
      • dfxm12 11mo ago
        Less concentrated wealth means less discretionary funds for bribery. :)
    • dfxm12 11mo ago
      You still have to prove if raising wages will reduce corruption, and if so, prove that it is reasonably cost effective. Keep in mind, there are already independently wealthy people involved in government in the US, and they still engage in corruption: Trump & his family, Musk while at Doge, Chris Collins, etc. After all, how much do you have to pay the world's richest man to keep things above board, I wonder?
• gwbas1c 11mo ago
  > as the electorate has already shown they don't care enough to vote their representatives out for doing it The problem arises from how we run elections. It's very hard to dislodge an incumbent when the small group of people voting in a primary are very biased, and then the people voting in the general election really don't want the candidate from the other party. I suggest reading "Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America" by Lee Drutman. https://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Two-Party-Doom-Loop-Multiparty/dp/0190913851 https://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Two-Party-Doom-Loop-Multipar...
  • amavect 11mo ago
    Lee Drutman advocates for ranked choice voting, but implementations in the USA still degenerated to 2 parties. RCV still has a spoiler effect. https://realrcv.equal.vote/alaska22 https://realrcv.equal.vote/alaska22 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhO6jfHPFQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhO6jfHPFQU Instead, we need approval voting, or even STAR voting. https://www.equal.vote/ https://www.equal.vote/ (Drutman appears to have somewhat changed his views on RCV, but I don't think his "fusion voting" idea will catch on until we have multiple parties in the first place. https://www.newamerica.org/political-reform/blog/how-i-updated-my-views-on-ranked-choice-voting/ https://www.newamerica.org/political-reform/blog/how-i-updat... )
  • mola 11mo ago
    It's funny. In my failing democracy people are convinced the solution is a two party system like the US (we have a parliament with a large amount of parties) Somehow I have a feeling the problem is not the system, but the culture...
    • amavect 11mo ago
      >In my failing democracy Which nation, may I ask?
  • mrguyorama 11mo ago
    Also you need a hundred million dollars to run a campaign at all. Bernie snuggles up to the democrat party because even being extremely popular doesn't ensure you will be re-elected if you don't run a campaign. The 2024 and 2020 elections cost $15 and $18 billion dollars. We literally spend more than it costs to build an aircraft carrier, for no reason. An entire industry exists to suck up that money every 2-4 years. All that money comes from rich "donors", who always want to ask how you feel about <X> before agreeing to give you that money instead of your competitor. Most countries have strict limits on how much you can spend on campaigns, and limit how early you can start campaigning. Only in the US do you have to endure presidential campaign adverts in off years. Only in the US have we decided it's wrong to prevent the rich from totally controlling our electoral process through their wealth and resources. This no limits system means our politicians aren't even up for sale, they are up for auction. Can you outbid Dupont the next time regulation comes up for forever chemicals?
• andsoitis 11mo ago
  How much do they get paid currently? Many people agree with Bay Area's idea that people making less than $105k are poor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46036803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46036803
  • dr_dshiv 11mo ago
    Not enough to attracted talented, sane people with strong ethical values
    • hugeBirb 11mo ago
      Braindead to think salary is somehow attached to morality. I would say some of the most immoral people are people with a lot of money, and there are countless examples of that.
      • dr_dshiv 11mo ago
        My logic is that, if you are trying to evaluate whether you'd want to be a politician, consideration of cost/benefit is rational. If you aren't ethical, the benefit of being a politician is a lot higher (because you can get unethical sources of funds). If we want to attract more sane, talented, ethical people, we need to pay more — and prevent blatant corruption like privledged trading.
        • hugeBirb 11mo ago
          "trying to evaluate...". Normal people aren't trying to evaluate becoming a politician. It's a lifelong career for most people and you think the lunch lady or librarian who constantly gives back to their community was evaluating on "becoming" a politician? The financial incentives should be lowered. Pay them like you pay a school teacher and ban insider trading. Then you wouldn't have all these worthless nepo babies who just want a lax job and power over people in these positions.
          • dr_dshiv 11mo ago
• hugeBirb 11mo ago
  Why would we pay them more? The people who are in Congress for the money are the exact type of people I don't want in Congress.
  • IanCal 11mo ago
    I understand this, but at the same time the concept of this to me is absolutely wild. We see this in the UK, the exact same argument. Yet I was paid more to manage a small tech team than an MP for fewer hours. You actively disincentivise people like me from taking public positions. I'm doing tech contracting and earn more than Prime Minister. The UK gets about a trillion dollars a year in, and spends more. The US takes in something like five trillion dollars. An exceptionally small improvement in improving the economy pays for itself indefinitely because these countries are absolutely enormous. Our MPs are paid about 90k/year, if you could improve the tax take of the government by 0.1% by improving the economy in some way *once* you could pay them £1M/year *tax free* and you could pay that *forever* even if future people aren't as good they're just not actively detrimental. This is also for paying people who aren't actually making big decisions, just the elected representatives. Money should not be an issue, missing a good person because of the money is utter insanity given the payback.
  • jobs_throwaway 11mo ago
    Because the most capable among us are able to command high salaries regardless of whether they're 'in it for the money'. Congress needs to be competitive with industry for the best talent. Also, giving politicians legitimate income makes them less susceptible to bribery and other forms of unethical income.
    • hugeBirb 11mo ago
      This is so naive. No amount of money could force me to work for a company I didn't agree with morally, if I am able to "command" a higher salary I can command it elsewhere. And less susceptible to bribery? I can guarantee you that someone bringing in ~ $200k a year doesn't need to be looking for other sources of income. What do they tell poor people? Stop buying starbucks? Pull yourself up by the bootstraps! Shame they'd have to live a less lavish lifestyle as a public servant :( So at this point we should have to beg people and incentivize them with astronomical salaries to not be a piece of shit? I think this is just the product of late stage capitalism. Nobody gives a fuck about anything besides money and how to get more of it.
• georgeburdell 11mo ago
  I’m also in the camp of paying government officials more. In my town, the mayor and council make about $30k each while the median income in the city is well over $100k and houses cost over $1M. That self-selects out the majority of qualified candidates who must work for a living. We have several high tech companies as well as a pro sports team that perpetually influence politics to the city’s detriment, and the stooges that get put on our ballot each election are simply under-equipped to combat them.
  • Joker_vD 11mo ago
    > In my town, the mayor and council make about $30k each while the median income in the city is well over $100k and houses cost over $1M. The chief of police summons a recently enrolled policeman in his office: "The accounting called, and apparently you never picked your pay cheques in the last 6 months? What's up with that?" ― "Wait, we get paid? I thought it was, you get the badge and then gun, and then you're on your own!" The things with jokes, however, is that they probably should not become reality.
  • trollbridge 11mo ago
    "Mayor" where I live is effectively a volunteer position. Raising the salary would require the village fully fund the position for the extent of a mayoral term which is too expensive. So instead they hire a city manager who basically runs everything, at a much higher salary, which meets budget rules since they could in theory fire him if they run out of money. Hence the city manager is an unelected strong executive, which is not good for democracy.
  • Scubabear68 11mo ago
    Here in NJ, I live in a small town of around 7,000 or so. We have a Township Committee form of government, five committee people with one nominally as Mayor (but really the same as everyone else). They get a yearly stipend of around $5,000 a year or a little less. It sounds crazy but our whole muni budget is under $5 million. We have almost no infrastructure other than roads (98% of housing is on well water and septic systems, there are no street lights or sewers or the like). A lot of municipal government in the US is like this. Very small with near-volunteers running everything. You are right that this rules out a lot of people who can't afford to effectively volunteer for local government. I think mostly this is a good thing.
• dfxm12 11mo ago
  I don't understand how paying them more will curtail this. This is a mixture of a crime of convenience and greed. It's not a Les Mis situation where they need these stock picks to survive (or even thrive). The current US Administration is full of rich people who are still not above corruption. Obama signed the STOCK act into law, but of course, who watches the watchmen? The Restore Trust In Congress Act is sitting there, waiting for Mike Johnson to bring it to a vote.
  • stetrain 11mo ago
    The idea is that if their salary does not actually cover the expenses of living in and traveling to DC to do their job, you are limiting the pool of potential congressional representatives to those who are independently wealthy or who are finding other ways to make money via their position. Paying enough to cover the expenses of the job isn't a solution to all problems, just kind of a minimum bar if we want a normal person to be able do the job without relying on other income sources.
    • rileymat2 11mo ago
      At first I am sympathetic to this idea, but the act of running is so expensive and time consuming, it does not matter what the salary will be, the pool is already limited. You need to be well connected and/or wealthy before you even start.
      • hypeatei 11mo ago
        That's true, and I think Bernie's idea of having publicly funded elections is great because of that issue.
        • IgorPartola 11mo ago
          Or don’t have elections and pick legislators randomly like we pick juries.
          • 11mo ago
• SilverBirch 11mo ago
  You've just been presented evidence that your law makers are doing something immoral, something that should be illegal, and your idea is to pay them more. Do you also advocate putting a little pot of cash at the front of every walmart so the shop lifters can just take the cash and pay for the stuff they were going to steal?
  • hypeatei 11mo ago
    > Do you also advocate putting a little pot of cash ... Yes, obviously I would support that /s The idea of increasing pay for members of Congress is that we naturally discourage seeking out other forms of building wealth and/or paying bills while in office regardless of existing laws. You can also have laws that explicitly stop things like insider trading too, but obviously you can't solve for every scenario so this would be a blanket solution. I understand that corruption can't be solved by this one action and that members can still be corrupt after a pay increase, but on the whole, I think it'd be a positive change. It's a hard problem to solve without burning everything down... which only sounds good in theory and may not result in a better system.
• rs186 11mo ago
  "create very strict laws" Who's going to draft those laws? Definitely not the lawmakers who could benefit from this. See the problem?
• misiti3780 11mo ago
  the solution is dont let them pick individual stocks, only indexes. they also should have to publish all trades publicly the day the trade takes place CA doesnt care about this -- you continue to re-elected Pelosi, she is one of the worst violators of this
  • tptacek 11mo ago
    In what way? Because she's long a lot of high-variance tech stocks? You could probably outperform her just going all-in on QQQ.
• lfuller 11mo ago
  From my perspective it would make a lot more sense to only allow index fund purchases as an elected official. If the economy does well you still do well, but there would clearly be no insider trading going on. Or at least there would be less - you could only trade on the knowledge of full-market swings rather than per-company swings.
  • magicalhippo 11mo ago
    > From my perspective it would make a lot more sense to only allow index fund purchases as an elected official. The new leader[1] of the Norwegian wealth fund[2] had a large stock portfolio. There was some debacle given the influential nature of the wealth fund. He agreed to sell the stocks and buy index funds instead, until he resigned from that position. As you say, I think that's very reasonable. They can still make money off the general stock market lkkd the rest so they're not disadvantaged, but have very limited opportunity to benefit significantly from inside deals. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolai_Tangen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolai_Tangen [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Norway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...
• jjk166 11mo ago
  The logic of paying lawmakers well is that if they have enough money they won't be at tempted to do bad things to get more money. All of human history has shown that "enough money" is not a meaningful term for people attracted to such positions. Lawmakers should be paid enough that they are not destitute, so that low income people are not excluded from participating in government, but the price of power should be that one can not become wealthy during or shortly after their stint. Tax their household 100% on all income and capital gains over the congressional salary (which should be comparable and pegged to the average DC area household income) for their term and over a reasonably small multiple of that salary for 10 years after they leave office. They can insider trade all they want, they can take a cushy job with a company that lobbied them, but all the money they would make by these efforts will go to the people. In practice I think most would not bother. Some people may choose not to go into government because they have better earning opportunities elsewhere, I consider that a feature not a bug. Some may leave office earlier than they otherwise would because they don't like the low income, again that's a good thing. Non-monetary quid pro quo is still an issue, but it's no worse than the current situation and frankly power will always come with perks. Exempt sitting congresspeople from the change they implement and any of their past potentially ill gotten gains will be exempt from prosecution. Passing a major anti-corruption bill while legalizing your own grift? It may very well pass unanimously.