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Comment by beeforpork | Hacker News Reader

That is all true. But who wants to be a politician when they are public figures that are beaten, accused, humiliated by opponents, the public, and everyone really. You cannot do it right and most people will probably hate you, regardless of what you do. It's not a pleasant job. Unless you get money for all of this unpleasantness. And then, some entities have more money to give than others (you said that in your last sentence). So this attracts exactly those people to be politicians that you might not want to be politicians. Of course, some are better than others (so do go vote for the right ones), but they all need a certain trait for this job.

So how to break this unfortunate dependency? Give the 'right' entities comparably enough money to pay politicians? But how? Like climate vs. oil. OK, that's cheap, but anyway. You cannot expect the system to work with less money flow, I think.

So how to change this?

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Pay so well for the role and have a sufficient pension such that you are forbidden from receiving any kind of further compensation even when you are no longer in the role (or in kind gift or direct charitable contributions). Honestly, US congress people should be paid in the high hundreds of thousands for the work they do and the control they have over the world’s largest economy. It’s kind of ridiculous how low information voters think it’s ok to punish politicians for increasing salaries but ignore the actual budget and what we spend money on because that’s complicated.

Think of it another way. Is there any other CEO or even senior director that couldn’t afford to live near their HQ? And yet, that’s true if you’re a congressperson that’s not independently wealthy. Said another way, we’re unhappy paying politician’s money from the government directly but then complain that all the politician’s are the super wealthy or find alternate income streams? This is very intentional by the way - it’s very convenient for the wealthy in the US to have a political class that is either filled with direct peers or protects them because that’s where the real money comes from even if it’s net parasitic to the US as a whole.

We’ve know for decades - take money out of politics and make it about civil service. To do so requires campaign finance reform (limits on spending and sources of $) as well as making lobbying illegal

People like you are exactly the reason why we can't have competent politicians. Who apart from crazy ideologues, the crooked and those that can't hack it as anything else than demagogues do you expect to sign up for a job where you are a public punching ball on terrible pay and with limited ability to diverge from whatever party line or other contingencies dictate?

Can you explain why? Obviously the current system isn’t producing competent ones either.

Sorry, I edited my comment to add some context. It seems very likely to me that if we could increase pay of politicians by a factor of 10 (say), we'd get much much better performance at lower effective cost than we already pay for the soft corruption of "speaking fees" and suchlike.

Unfortunately that seems to be politically infeasible (not even competent autocratic regimes can get away with paying themselves above board).

Well, I'm for campaign finance but not money out of politics.

The president should be getting like 400M/yr instead of 400k/yr. But also paying for their own trips/security/housing/etc and if it turns out 400M/yr isn't enough for that then it should be a higher number.

The fact that the "execs" of congress get paid so little in salary but make it out from outside employment (or by having the government itself pay for it) hampers the rest of the government since it limits what they can pay for every other role in government. Using your ability to run the country efficiently should be a highly paying job so it causes people to actually want to do it.

This is a capitalistic society, you want to have somebody that can estimate a project accurately? You'll need to pay.

Be Bernie Sanders, apparently.

The bar is pretty low. Don't be an obvious crook or treat yourself like you're in a different class and flout it. Don't vote party lines if it doesn't reflect your constituency, and encourage grassroots involvement and policy voting.

Identity politics drove people off the deep end, because if you disliked Clinton's track record of neoliberal politics, her flagrant corruption and disdain for the working class, and penchant for globalism, then you failed the loyalty test and could be freely ostracized as a secret bigot or false flag operator.

That should have been quashed hard by journalists, but the media lined up, and then Big Tech started putting their fingers on the scales, and we were all left worse off for it.

Trust is earned over a lifetime of accountability and consistency, but that's harder than taking payouts from special interests and voting how your party wants. As they say, eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.

I have no idea why you were downvoted for this comment. The change, in my opinion ought to include a cap on wealth and enough pay for politicians that they can govern while living in a very comfortable lifestyle. Present day pay ought to be sufficiently high that all but the very greedy don't look longingly for a payout in the future.

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