TBH, it seems like an idea that sounds good on the surface but has practical issues in implementation that would make it irrelevant
It is absolutely possible for a new imperfect system to be worse than the imperfect system that it replaces.
That’s patently false. Nancy Pelosi is no longer Speaker of the House.
The former Speaker of the House’s husband was the one doing all that.
You can put $X into the trust, but you never know which companies that money is invested in. When you ask for $Y to be paid out, the manager of the fund sells what they see fit to fulfill the request without the client's involvement/input
The fact is that there are a lot of jobs that, at a minimum, place a lot of restrictions on the purchases and sale of stock of individual companies. (Many journalists and analysts for example.)
Or are we saying that a person in congress is not allowed to start a business?
It does seem better than the status quo of ‘extremely lucky’ returns though.
And also all the state and local governments are heavily depending on equities to deliver major gains to fulfill their deferred compensation for government employees (otherwise they have to increase taxes to make up for lack of any performance), so the more state and local tax you pay or are able to pay, the more invested you are in backstopping the markets also.
I think if we raised salaries your sentiment could work, but good luck with that.
Is the CEO of Tesla (~50B ?) really more impactful than the US president (~400k/yr) ?
Rich people whining about not being super mega rich. Fuck these asshats.
How about a public service that DOESN'T attract people who's primary directive is get ridiculously wealthy?
I suspect government is actually not nearly as lucrative as non-government and that's why people who "don't have the skills" are in government.
But if they're making say ~2M/yr then there's very little reason to go lenient on a company so that they'll give you a retirement job there afterwards. It also means that if somebody wants to bribe you then the bribe has to be rather large as you're both risking that salary and you also certainly don't need that bribe. (Although I do also think the government should stop footing the bill for a lot of the stuff the congress critters do and if you want to spend 1/2 your presidency golfing that comes at your own expense).
The salaries of government people has filter down affects though as federal employees cannot make more than the vice president (~261,400).
If we believe this to be effective for individuals on Wall Street I'm sure it's a good start for Congress.
Want to compete with legacy auto? Want to compete with Google? Hmm, lets think of all the new regulations that you might have to meet. There are perverse incentives even in that system.
https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=174%2C000.00&y...
To receive a congressional pension, you need 5 years of service (to be elected to 3 terms), the pension can't exceed 80% of your salary, and is based on the number of years of service.. There are ~280 prior members of congress collecting FERS pensions and the average collected was $41k/year in 2016.