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One of my favorite recently learned facts about Congress: Federally mandated parental leave (paternity and maternity leave) polls at about 80% in favor with th

• hahahaa 4mo ago
  If a million people want it and it is worth $100 to them they could create a superpac for this with $100m funding?
  • random3 4mo ago
    Yes, apparently there are crowdfunded superpacs exactly for this purpose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayday_PAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayday_PAC
• Fomite 4mo ago
  One of the things I have found so alarming about a lot of recent revelations is just how cheap congress goes for.
  • nelsondev 4mo ago
    I believe $50-100k
    • refulgentis 4mo ago
      Absolutely not.
    • PyWoody 4mo ago
      You're off by 10.
  • georgemcbay 4mo ago
    > One of the things I have found so alarming about a lot of recent revelations is just how cheap congress goes for. The executive branch is also available for relatively bargain basement prices! Ask us about our unlimited pardoning power for federal offenses! #Ad #WorldLibertyFinancial
  • tzs 4mo ago
    Watch out though because many of those revelations are bogus and only look at how much money people lobbying for a position donated to some member of Congress who voted for that position. They fail to look up how much money people lobbying against that position donated to that same member of Congress. Often times it is about the same amount, which means you cannot infer that the money influenced the vote. Some do it right, but enough do not that unless you know you are getting the information from one of the ones who does it right you really need to check for yourself.
  • vineyardmike 4mo ago
    I only-kinda-jokingly say that I'd be willing to be the sacrifice and get a second mortgage on my house if it could buy the entire nation some new rights. Our politicians routinely sell out smaller issues for "downpayment in a coastal metro" level of money. It's just about within reach of a middle-class urban adult to directly fund with some personal sacrifices. I feel like we like to imagine that these corporations are budgeting big-bucks to bribe/lobby politicians, because they have more money than most humans can actually mentally picture, but their budgets are often closer to a small team of software engineers' salary. Meta spend ~$25M on all lobbying last year - and they're the top corporate spender. That's under 1 hours of revenue for them.
    • nine_k 4mo ago
      > could buy the entire nation some new rights It's important to remember that rights cannot be received, or bought. Privileges can. Equally easily privileges can be taken away again. But rights can only be won in a fight. Sadly, they also require a constant readiness to fight for keeping them; in civilized societies this happens in courtrooms, but escalations to the worse happen periodically.
    • BobbyTables2 4mo ago
      Always wondered about this… Are politicians really so beholden to an anonymous donor that makes a single $50k donation? Or even a single $500k one? Or is it the real knowledge that said known regular donors will continue indefinitely as long as things go their way (and indefinitely support the opposition otherwise) …? The pessimistic part of me wonders if a grassroots campaign that raised $10M would even be able drive any change with it.
      • rightbyte 4mo ago
        I think it is more that corps select which politician gets ahead than that they are beholden to them. 50k USD is a an awful lot of money for a lower level politician to run an election campaign with.
    • red-iron-pine 4mo ago
  • janalsncm 4mo ago
    In that case, maybe it would make sense for regular people to create their own PACs. Like a privacy PAC. Pay for lobbyists who are more persuasive than our angry emails. As they say, freedom ain’t free.
    • orblivion 4mo ago
      https://theonion.com/american-people-hire-high-powered-lobbyist-to-push-inte-1819571821/ https://theonion.com/american-people-hire-high-powered-lobby...
  • panicinducer 4mo ago
    This gets it a bit backwards, the money is a reward for playing along within the system, not a straight cash-for-policy transaction. If you don't play along with the elite line, they throw $50 million into a primary election to get you out of power. That's where you start to get into enough money to make a political difference, and even then the money is only part of the equation.
• 8note 4mo ago
  if DSA gets enough people in, that might go through? pretty directly within the realms of what their candidates support, and they have a pretty good purity test to tell who to support or not with the genocide question
  • 1over137 4mo ago
    DSA?
    • deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    • tjwebbnorfolk 4mo ago
      Communists
• baranul 4mo ago
  Well, if you think money in politics or corporations buying politicians is bad now, it is going to get exponentially worse in the USA. The Supreme Court recently gave a decision that allows the rich oligarchy to give unlimited amounts of money[1] to their favorite puppets... excuse me, politicians. [1]: https://www.npr.org/2026/06/30/nx-s1-5827039/supreme-court-campaign-finance https://www.npr.org/2026/06/30/nx-s1-5827039/supreme-court-c...
• anonymousiam 4mo ago
  Free housing, free food, free health care, and free income are also wildly popular with the US adult population. The problem is that those things are not really "free" because somebody else needs to pay for them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
  • NDlurker 4mo ago
    Better to spend money on helping our neighbors than going around the world murdering people
    • pixl97 4mo ago
      [flagged]
    • alex43578 4mo ago
      Does free housing help people? The state of “the projects” in every metro would say otherwise. Does free food help people? Most Americans are already overweight, and far, far more die every year from diseases of excess consumption than hunger/malnutrition. Furthermore, when you give them food stamps, they try to sell and defraud the program to buy drugs or alcohol. We already “help” these people to the tune of many billions of dollars a year - let’s ask they make some cultural changes before we dive even deeper into debt as a nation.
      • hilariously 4mo ago
        >Does free housing help people? Studies say yes. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8513528/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8513528/ Your vibes and general lack of empathy don't make you correct.
        • 9x39 4mo ago
          That disabled non-producers go to the ER less if given an apartment is true doesn't make it empathetic or correct to build enormous unproductive spending networks under the label of homelessness, either. https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/california-homelessness-spending-audit-24b-five-years-didnt-consistently-track-outcomes/ https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/california-homeles... $50,000 a year per homeless with minimal, if any, result - if it's empathy, it's suicidal empathy to emit those kinds of funds without results year after year into systems that have sprung up to capture them and ask for more.
• jmyeet 4mo ago
  This has been studied, famously by Princeton [1]. The chance of any given bill passing is roughly 30% and any amount of public support from 0% to 100% has almost zero impact on that 30%. Elected offices have become fiefdoms to enrich oneself and maintain the status quo. Anyone who bucks this trend has historically rarely gotten into office or been chased out once they do. This could be from funding another candidate, simply starving an existing candidate of campaign funds or in some cases by redistricting somebody out of a seat. And look at the reelection rates for Congress [2]. They tend to hover between 90% and 95%. [1]: https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba [2]: https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/reelection-rates https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/reelection-ra...
• yieldcrv 4mo ago
  If we had voter referendums at the federal level, most “hot button” partisan issues would be solved because there is consensus across 70-75% of the population, even if weighted by state somehow
• thayne 4mo ago
  From the responses I've gotten from my representatives when I've written them, my impression is they care a lot more about their corporate sponsors and the party line than they do about their constituents.
• AnthonyMouse 4mo ago
  > Federally mandated parental leave (paternity and maternity leave) polls at about 80% in favor with the US adult population. This is regardless of political affiliation, by the way. Democrat and Republican voters both support it. This sounds like the sort of thing where if you poll people yes/no, a majority of people support it, but then if you ask them whether they'll change their vote over it, the people who said yes say it's not their most important issue and they don't care about it enough to do anything. Whereas the people who said no are e.g. small business owners if you don't exempt them from it because they can't afford to pay someone for extended time off while simultaneously paying someone else to fill in for them, or large business owners if you do exempt the small businesses because they hate anything that gives smaller companies a relative advantage, and both of them will actually care if you try to do it and oppose the policy either way for fear that it might get changed during or after being enacted. So then you have 80% wants x 1% cares vs. 20% wants x 75% cares and the second number ends up being bigger.
  • throwaway173738 4mo ago
    Washington’s paid parental leave act has us put money into our Unemployment Insurance program in addition to the UI payments we already make. So the business owners don’t have to pay for it, they just have to allow it to happen.
    • AnthonyMouse 4mo ago
      What percent of the original 80% who supported it still support it when you tell them they're the ones who will pay for it though? (They would have been either way, but that sort of thing tends to affect polling numbers.)