This should be a much bigger issue, IMO. We the People need to make them understand this blatant self dealing will not be tolerated.
Agreed, but the ban on federal officials owning individual stocks is actually gaining momentum and I think has a good chance of passing, though what happens in November may change that.
The solution is simple. Being in office (or working for the federal government, or any level government for that matter) is a privilege, not a right. If you want to exercise that privilege, then you should have to give up the right to directly trade any stock/fund. Your broker whom you can't divulge any info to then has the same footing as the rest of us.
I don't think this is right. My small town government isn't going to make any money on trading. Even if we contracted with a company big enough to be public, the contract would be too small to make any impact. Also, most in the military or civilian contractor positions have no real insight into the market moving deals. Nor do they generally have the capital to really take advantage.
It's the high level officials and bureaucrats that need to be restricted, not the rank and file.
No, that's not how that would work. You'd treat it the same way that you do with executives owning stock but having insider knowledge. All of their transfers are done on a schedule and changes to the schedule have to be done in advance.
Would that be such a downer for people looking to serve in government? Certain special limits seem reasonable to apply to government officials that have special knowledge or other authority.
What we really need is all assets of elected officials held in blind trust, bar none, no exceptions, I think. Though I'm no hedge fund wizard and I'm sure there's a loophole to exploit there as well.
Yes absolutely. I would also add:
- Mandatory retirement from public office at age 65. We have minimum ages for elected office, nothing wrong with a maximum age.
- Ban on lobbying for 10 years after leaving office.
You can as easily argue the opposite: older people can be more conscientious because they have less to gain and less to lose. Who cares more about a payoff: someone who already has their gains and fewer years left, or the hungrier younger person?
I suspect you have based your “fact” on sampling bias - we don’t get good visibility metrics on young corrupted politicians (not so many young politicians, not so much time for them to have been caught making egregious errors). Disclaimer: middle-aged engineer type.
How many people in their tweens to 40th have ever filled the roles they were talking about? That's the only timeframe this argument would make sense to me.
I really can't see their comment as bigoted as you claim. There really is a strong selection bias with people filling these roles at that age and them behaving like that. That's doesn't mean that people in that age braket are always corrupt, but people that have been in these roles for extended periods of time generally are corrupt.
Representatives, whether young or old, never face the consequences of their actions because they exist in a separate system from the rest of society. They have special health care, private schools, and so on.
Sure, a 65-year-old age limit would exclude some candidates who get into politics at a later age, or who are uniquely gifted. But there are plenty of examples from across the political spectrum of people who should perhaps move on to write their memoirs instead of running for that nth term.
Average age of US citizens is 38.8 years. I don't think this needs to be exactly the same & I think it's good for senators to skew older as wisdom accrues with age, but this doesn't simply mean "older is better."
Mostly I think it would be good to build the next generation of leaders periodically. Senate seats are and congress are zero-sum, the next person can't get into that seat until someone else gets out, and those "years as a legislator" are important to operate effectively.
1: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46705#:~:text....
I'd be in favor of a two-term limit personally, for many of the same reasons. If it's good enough for the President it should be good enough for other offices. I don't think political office should be a lifetime career. It attracts too many power-seeking, controlling personality types. We don't need those people around forever. Too many people in office have no private sector experience at all, yet they are making the rules that the rest of us live by.
We have a census to grow the numbers in the House, but they passed a law to stop that.
"The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand..."
"Representation based on population in the House was one of the most important components of the Federal Constitutional Convention of 1787."
https://history.house.gov/Institution/Origins-Development/Pr...
And yes, as people age, they do tend to suffer cognitive decline. You may be the exception, but as a rule it's still a factual statement.
I'd rather see a lifetime vow of poverty, where officeholders were forbidden to derive any income at all other than their pensions.
The term "lobbying" is essentially slang.
Lobbying is just the name we give to the act of paying someone to petition the government for a redress of grievances on someone else's behalf. So to ban someone from lobbying for any amount of time is essentially banning them from petitioning the government. Which is forbidden by the Constitution.
It's a way more complicated issue than "ban lobbying".
Match it to social security age.
What people hate but I strongly believe in is that we should pay people a stipend to run for office. And we should pay congressmen and senators more than we do. And give them a full years salary when they leave office. Seriously guys producing webshit for FANNG companies are making more than their congressman.
That way the tax payer can still get the payout
Going short is always a bad idea. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. In other words, you can win at most 100% while you can lose more than 100%, so why make such a bet.
It kind of opened my eyes to how much a maze the IC is regarding classifications and data restrictions. We may both have TS clearances, but I may have access to wayyyy more crazy stuff than you do, based on what I am officially working on. However, on paper we may have the same levels of "trust" from the system's perspective.
This is as good a start at curbing this behavior, as is practical right now.
At the very least, criminal immunity and being required to carry large insurance policies for civil damages. Paid for out of pocket and underwritten based on their job performance/complaints.
2A was supposed to be insurance against nonsense like this.
The best argument I know against this is that it shifts power toward lobbyists and all those awful "deep state" people (you know, career civil servants) everyone suddenly started being worried about a few years ago, and away from elected officials.
Not sure that's what we want to incentivize.
Cronyism and back door politics within the government are far from the worst outcomes, especially compared to private industry having more power over government officials.
Asset forfeiture has definitely got to go.
This would nearly instantly eliminate most of the advantage of insider trading with far less regulatory overhead and the inevitable over- and under-prosecution of crimes. Elon Musk or Mark Cuban or some legislator starts buying batches of options? Everyone already knows and the market can move on it's own.
House: H.R.6490 - Banning Insider Trading in Congress Act (https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/6490), Sponsor: Rep. Hartzler, Vicky [R-MO-4]
Senate: S.3504 - Banning Insider Trading in Congress Act (https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/350...) Sponsor: Sen. Hawley, Josh [R-MO]
Found this Democrat-sponsored bill: H.R.8990 - Combatting Financial Conflicts of Interest in Government Act (https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/8990...), Sponsor: Rep. Lofgren, Zoe [D-CA-19]
EDIT: removed markdown formatting
Small steps can ensure transparency and maybe, just maybe, help with the problem.
Compared to the impact they can have at their job (positive or negative), this just doesn't seem like a big deal to me. Obviously I'd prefer if they didn't do it, but I don't see why it needs to be a bigger issue.
Insider trading causes two problems:
* Undermines faith in, and thus reduces efficacy of, financial markets
* Reduces the overall returns for everyone else a bit
While it becomes a problem when rampant throughout the market, I don't think a few hundred members of congress would collectively have much impact here.
I'm also a little wary of the kind of person who's willing to go into politics and isn't in it for the money. While there are a handful of truly dedicated public servants, most people who aren't in it for the money are either extreme ideologues or power hungry narcissists. I'll take a politician who's mildly financially corrupt over someone who wants to abolish either taxes or private property, and way over one who wants to become a dictator.
To make it a programming analogy, to someone who has no clue about coding a yearly bonus to each developer based on lines of code written sounds like a good way to reward the more productive developers. But anyone with a couple days experience realizes how trivial that system would be to game.
Perhaps this is unnecessarily pedantic, but what you're describing is a "conflict of interest" problem, not an "insider trading" problem. You can have either problem without the other, and depending on how you crack down on insider trading, it could be completely ineffective at solving the conflict of interest problem.
I want to add that there's a real possibility that legislation to address this (totally legitimate) issue goes too far and makes it even harder for non-wealthy people to run for public office - I think it's unreasonable for a new congressperson who owns a home and a small amount of an S&P index fund to have to set up a blind trust for their partner's uncle.
It's the same conflict of interests problem here. Are your politicians acting for the sake of the public, or do they have their own financial interests in mind when putting forth a policy? E.g. if they've made financial commitments in expectation of a policy that will benefit that investment, that can most certainly influence their decision on said policy.
Consider the extreme: a congress person shorts a stock because they know a downturn is coming, then they enact policies that prolong the downturn and in turn increase their windfall.
Reading intelligence reports and selling mutual funds isn't the same thing. Not just on technicality but because there's no room for corruption. Insider corporate information can be exploited against people or even engineered to create opportunities. COVID was going to happen no matter what. And really COVID data wasn't really secret. Congress was having it shoved in their faces but the WHO and CDC were ringing bells in public disclosures for anyone savvy enough to understand.
It's unsavory but it's not really a threat. At least not most of the examples listed in this article. There is likely some genuine corruption going on too. The SC just gave Ted Cruz (and everyone else) a pass to self-deal from his campaign fund.
I don't think it does. You can hear overhear information from someone in a bar and that is still insider trading. That's how I remember my training from working in fintech at least.
This is by design of course. "You don't want the gays using your bathrooms!" while they pillage the country.
Right now my country is having federal elections and everything from bathrooms to what people do in their beds in private is being discussed, except actual plans for education, health and the economy. It's a celebrity shitshow and it seems to have infected most countries.
If Congress, the STOCK act really needs update to have some teeth. Right now, they usually get a $200 fine (which is often waive) for what is effectively insider trading. Make that fine 6 figures and maybe that'll help.
If bureaucrats, I'm not sure why existing insider trading laws wouldn't apply? It seems we just need the DoJ/SEC to do their job.
This is not true. There is a fine for not disclosing. For actual insider trading, the FBI has subpoenaed sitting Senators' phones [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_congressional_insider_tra...
How? There are no term limits. The richer the get the more power the have. It's a self-sustaining circuit.
It’s absolute filth.
Someone suggests you head to DC, and start talking to congresscritters (or their aides) about the message of CampaignForFooBarForAll.
You'd love to do this. But you need to pay the rent, and for food, and other regular expenses. Someone in the campaign suggests that they could pay for you to do this for 1 month a year.
Shall we send you to jail?
Let's suppose that you say "yes".
Now consider Jan Lobbier, who works for BigMega Corp. Jan is employed there full time, with various duties. Among them are trips and calls to DC to put the company's position in front of The People Who Matter. This is not Jan's only job, just a part of their job duties. Should Jan go to jail?
What you're suggesting would mean that lobbying could only be done by the financially independent (i.e. can lobby because they don't need to work), and that seems like a bad idea for everyone.
Politicians receive a salary, that should be enough, if the salary for a congress person isn't high enough, then we can talk about that at the next election, they also might be better at managing the economy and dealing with things like inflation because it would be a harsh reality for them, like it is for everyone else.
Systemic incentives tend to make idealists into insiders. You can blame people for being human if you want, but you will keep getting the same results.
Is it because We The People are completely brainwashed by our industrial puppetmasters at this point? The needle moves from voting to education. But how do I educate an entire generation about what they should demand from a government?
It's worked in many places that aren't the US.
Unfortunately that radicalized sector has often drifted towards a kind of antipolitics because the center-left has been comparatively ineffective and unable to respond adequately to the startling rightward shift of the GOP. The Democrats tend to cling to a rules-based system as the basis of a political mandate while the Republicans have had a strategy of opportunistically rewriting the rules at the first opportunity since at least the Gingrich era. In a way I don't blame them, it keeps working for them and a lot of their voters just aren't as hung up on intellectual consistency/credibility as the Democrats. It's perfectly acceptable for political surrogates on the right to state openly and explicitly that they DGAF about anything other than winning.
What has been strange to witness, in my view, is how the left was indeed radicalized during these years but, if anything, they seem to have moved in this weird direction of being part of the machinery of the establishment vs. their historical stance of being decidedly the opposite (at least in my view).
The other weirdness between the left and the right is the pretension that the core of either party are actually going to do anything for their respective bases vs. just continue to do whatever it takes to perpetuate their own power / positions, and yet neither side can see beyond this to find what is likely a great deal of common ground.
It's demoralizing from a civic idealism standpoint, but I've found that looking at it from a resource mobilization perspective make it easier - albeit at the price of sometimes feeling cynical or callous.