In the history books when they discuss the hundreds or thousands of small cuts that eventually killed America, Mike Johnson may very well be one of the most prominent captioned photos.
Well then that’s not capitalism.
Tbh idk why people think capitalism is a good thing. It’s just feudalism with corporations.
How about this:
We pay politicians in “X times the minimum wage”; for the sake of this example I’ll say 30x the minimum wage (too much? Too little? I don’t know, that’s not important rn)
The thing is, they can’t change this number, at all. The only way they can increase their salaries is to increase the minimum wage.
pretty sure most of them are millionaires, because the billionaire donors are giving them money, in other forms. even with those restrictions, they get millions from the billionaires in thier pockets. Thats why Dinos are fighting just as hard to keep that way.
Also politicians wouldn’t exactly be less corruptible if they were poorer.
Salary will have unintended consequences.
Why would anyone choose that job unless they were already very wealthy?
People who want to enact change. You can find plenty of those they just don’t have any visibility because money.
I think everyone wants to “enact change”.
The problem is, the people with the requisite skills can earn much more than $60k doing something else.
Alternatively, give all workers the same benefits politicians get.
I thought after citizens united they represent corporations not us
Let’s also start forcing them to work forty hours.
$1000 deductible?? i wish
I was on private health insurance for a couple of years. My premium was over $300 a month and my deductible was $7000. I had looked for an ACA policy on the government website but something with the same level of deductible was closer to $1000 a month. What really sucked is that my private policy did not qualify for the exemption from the fine you had to pay for not having health insurance. Somehow I never had to pay the fine, I dunno why not. I’m sure my policy also would have fucked me if I’d ever tried to collect on it, but fortunately I was completely healthy during that stretch.
$300/month 😂😭😢😐
OP has no idea what health insurance cost these days.
Nor do international members, care to share?
More like $1000+ a month for a policy with a $7000+ annual deductible. If you’re lucky and have a job with subsidized health insurance, it’s much more reasonable. I’m a school bus driver and have excellent health insurance (which is rare for school bus drivers); I pay $129 a month while the district pays the rest and I have essentially no deductible.
I guess the idea of paying them well is that they can’t be bought with bribes. Then again, when has any wealthy person ever been satisfied.
Honestly, there’s a load of satisfied wealthy people - you just don’t hear about them because, well, there’s literally nothing to report about them.
If the job didn’t pay a salary, the only people who could do the job would be the rich who don’t need a salary, or those willing to accept bribes.
If you make the salary too low, it will discourage anybody who can make a better living doing something else. And, if the people doing it don’t think they’re being paid what they’re really worth, they’re more likely to take bribes or “donations” to boost their salary back up to what it should be.
Really, the salary should be high. It should be a job that people who are really qualified will want to do. It should be one where you have no need to take a bribe because you’re already doing so well, and you’d be afraid of throwing away such a well compensated job.
They also carry a hell of a lot more responsibility than the average American worker. Is be in favor of a party raise along with restricting other income streams like stock investments.
I wouldn’t say it’s so that they can’t be bought, so much as so they don’t have to be bought. It’s part of the reason they haven’t voted for a pay raise and so long. Their owners don’t want them to have other options.
Lawmakers don’t vote for their pay raises, they don’t need to. The increases were made automatic in 1989. Even with the annual increases, their pay is nothing compared to what they can make from insider information and contributions from anonymous PACs. They can be bought, government salary just can’t compete with dark money.
That isn’t quite accurate. Congress hasn’t gotten a pay raise since 2009. Because they vote against giving themselves one.
Ah, I’d read they didn’t have to vote to get a pay raise. Didn’t see that they had been actively voting against it. But who needs a raise when you know you’ll get waaay more money from corps and special interest groups? Heck, they’ll even write the bills they want passed for you, so you don’t even have to work hard.
Ah, that makes sense.
300 a month and a thousand dollar deductible?!?!
where the fuck is that deal, it’s like 8k deductible and 600 a month
Oh man I’m sorry
The idea behind a high salary for representatives is that they don’t need to take on extra money from lobbyists to survive. Keep the salaries, but make bribery illegal again and things will get better. Make the salaries low AND get the money out of politics and you’ll only get rich people becoming politicians. Oh and term limits should be a thing.
Bribery is still illegal. But it’s not a “bribe” unless it’s paid directly to the politician in exchange for something specific (quid pro quo). So you just need to obfuscate that deal enough so that you can’t prove it’s a bribe, in the legal sense. (SuperPACs, etc).
Tbf yes, that’s what I meant. The legal form of bribery, shouldn’t be.
99% of a lawyers job is to find loopholes in the law.
Just pay well in advance of whatever you ask for and it’s fine apparently
This seems like it would make a rampant corrupt system even more corrupt. Imagine how cheap you could buy a rep for if they only made 60k on the books.
This is exactly how they got to where they are now. They tell you its to discourage bribing and then take the bribes anyways.
I think the government should switch to a random lottery. Every term a random person is selected from all available and eligible citizens. It would be our civic duty, put your regular job on hold for a few years and do your part.
Most would hate it, but that’s kinda the point. If we all had to eat our own dogfood, we’d eventually start making it taste better.
I’ve said this for years. Live in dorms. Cafeteria food. Minimum wage. All assets put into trust and in a vanilla total market fund for 5-10 years after service. It should be like jury duty. I’ve not met a single person who disagrees with this system.
I’ve not met a single person who disagrees with this system.
Well consider me the first.
Then first the plan won’t work, those dorms will be run by the very government politicians they are supposed to make miserable. so they won’t.
And why must that be a goal in the first place? Instead of improving democracy so that politicians aren’t in the pockets of PACs and actually represent the people, you want to just make them both miserable and now unelected.
If you want that random people are in charge instead of politicians a direct democracy system will work far better then this.
Who said anything about making them miserable? That isn’t, and shouldn’t be, the goal. The goal is to remove incentives to be corrupt.
A nice dorm and high quality food provided to them removes some of that.
Locking assets into total market funds removes incentive to inside trade, because you can’t.
Live in dorms. Cafeteria food. Minimum wage
I got that from this statement, my mistake then.
Most importantly, 24/7 surveillance. No secrets. No back room deals.
No one should live under 24/7 surveillance.
Oh look! You’ve made the bribery problem even worse.
Have you met a random person?
Know any politicians?
Probably why they’re here instead of Reddit.
I have indeed, I still trust them more than anyone who actually wants to be in politics.
There are also several proposals of random voting that have a lot of good things about them. In one system, you pick a random ballot out of all ballots, and whoever that person voted for wins for all positions.
Or, you can do it per elected position. Take all of the votes for each elected position and pick a random vote.
One advantage of random ballots is that no elected official is safe. A candidate who gets 60% of the vote can lose to a candidate who got 20% of the vote.
Why is this good?
Well, for one thing, it would be much harder to gerrymander. Gerrymandering generally means you have one party win most districts by a tiny amount, and the other party wins very few districts by a large amount. This strategy simply doesn’t work with random ballots.
Another benefit is that politicians would be incentivized to get as many votes as possible, far beyond 50%. Even a politician who gets 90% of the vote would lose 1 in 10 elections. So, politicians would work for everybody’s vote, not just for the slim majority’s vote.
It has other advantages beyond that. Mostly in the realm of the fairness of votes. You vote feels completely fair. It’s just as likely that your vote will decide the winner as anybody else’s vote.
One big disadvantage is that there might be an extremely popular politician, who has 99% of the vote, and who still loses. This can be mitigated a bit by keeping terms short. The politician could come back in a couple of years.
Another disadvantage is that it is very difficult to recount the ballots. You basically just pick another random ballot and all of the winners might change. And related, it’s more difficult to detect cheating after the fact. Like, what if the ballot wasn’t completely random?
Sortition. It’s a system that sounded crazy decades ago when I first heard it, but the more and more you think about it the more and more it doesn’t seem that bad.
Couldn’t we all just vote on shit regularly from home and do away with representatives altogether?
Maybe not everything, but we could certainly vote on a lot more directly. There’s no reason we couldn’t. Representative government was a necessity when we only used horses to get everywhere. Now much less reason for it.
The other point of representative government is that the people making the decisions can spend the time to research what they’re voting on.
It could be from macro to much more micro, e.g.: what portion of the budget should be allocated to education? And then how is the budget allocated, etc. everyone must vote in the first few votes and then as the issues get more nitty gritty and local the only people voting are those in the localities and/or those who care. You could vote on everything but realistically you’ll just set the main direction and the rest just happens.
The more you think about this the more complicated it seems, even if the concept isn’t that complicated. I’ve thought about this a lot for a long time and I honestly think we’d get so much more done.
I honestly think we need representational government. One of our big problems in this country is regular people thinking they understand all the nuance of an issue. Not that random assholes completely solve this issue, but the law of averages is enough that some would take this seriously and actually learn, listen and think before acting.
It’s mostly a joke though, obviously a random lottery will never happen, but I absolutely would choose it over what we have today.
Who decides what a random person is and what a knowledgeable person is in your scenario though? Where are these knowledgeable people? Our current Speaker of the House every time he gets in front of a TV Camera claims he knows nothing at all whatsoever. He’s never heard anything he’s never read anything he’s never seen anything and he just doesn’t know about anything. So knowledgeable people aren’t in charge now.
