The US would be far better off figuring out how to make its politicians do a good job before worrying about how outrageously they are compensated. Even the current fog of corruption they manage isn't as big a deal as the policies they push through as part of their routine above-the-counter activities. It's a sausage factory, the process of making the sausage isn't going to be pretty.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden... alone and you just need to look at Obama before and after to see what the stress does.
As opposed to now with all the highly qualified congresspersons.
Rayiner is claiming we would get better members if we raise it to $1 million per year, to which your reply is unresponsive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salaries_of_members_of_the_Uni...
The idea is that if you pay them $1M, they won’t do their side channel earnings (and therefore reduce their potential conflicts of interest)
Both seems highly unlikely to me.
If you pay them $1M salary, then a 50k donation/bribe/dinner is less convincing.
This isn’t going to stop it, but perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of better.
Another is assuming that the price to buy support is fixed and the coffers are limited. The price might be $50k because perhaps that is the sweet spot on your target, but support and donations will go higher if needed and the special interest is motivated to garner support.
There are less "causes" that have the ability to fund a $300k bribe so even with that argument, we're still better off. (And it costs those causes more, bigger paper trails etc.)
They just hire someone to do their trading for them and buy an island to go along with their yacht.
~150k sounds like a big salary but when you're very much in charge of trillions of annual revenue it's not.
Salary is not where congresspeople make their money and if you don't think that being in congress is a good way to make lots of money right now I don't know what to tell you
We're so obviously talking about total compensation. CEOs making $1 while getting billions in stock appreciation or literally hundreds of millions in stock grants are not making $1/year by any reasonable definition.
> f you don't think that being in congress is a good way to make lots of money right now I don't know what to tell you
So, you want to keep the status quo where the people who are correctly compensated for their role are the ones willing to front-run their own citizens? (And also spending their time front-running instead of their elected job?)
No, those are actually entirely different words than what I have said.
This is nothing but wishful thinking at best, and appeal to wealth at worst.
I would happily clear and re-populate both parties with candidates sharing those traits.
MTG, on the other hand, is and always has been an internet troll, and not even a high-quality troll - merely a ball of ignorance and bigotry that comes a dime a dozen in any competitive online game lobby or forum.
Google can bring many more examples. AOC is not more intelligent than MGT. They are two sides of the same coin.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/1857375/three-gaf...
https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/07/politics/alexandria-ocasio-co...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2024/10/30/alexandri...
Favorites might include the one where she fails in trying to identify the three branches of government, or the one where she says congressional reps are inaugurated and sign bills. Those don’t have the amusing color of MGTs idiotic statement, but they are every bit as stupid and maybe even more shocking, given her job.
You can't effectively represent the interests of others when your own needs are barely covered. I want my elected representatives paid quite well so that they have fewer excuses to succumb to the various temptations of holding such a position.
You can wish all you want that people with incredible power and responsibility should live like spiritual monks and possess only the purest and noblest of intentions, but that's not how people work, and it sure as hell isn't how politics works.
Labeling the act of someone getting paid to do a job as "bribery" is even more weird. While I certainly wouldn't do by current job if I was paid minimum wage, I don't know if I would say I'm being "bribed" by my employer to stick around. Even if it does appear to align with your new definition.
You may not like the reasons for WHY they work or not, but that is not relevant to WHETHER they work.
When I made minimum wage working at Subway, I would sneak extra sandwiches for myself here and there. I didn't strictly NEED them to physically survive, but hey -- I'm busting my ass for $7.25, I'm gonna pay myself a little bonus here and there. No one's watching, so I'm going to decide what's fair for a change.
Now I make much more than that. I no longer steal sandwiches from my employer.
I think this is the pattern for the great majority of people.
The root problem is abusing their office for financial gain.
Reducing their above the table pay doesn't actually change the abuse aspect much and the degree to which it does change things is not in a good direction.
(You see this in juries for example. They select the smart or authoritative person among them to be the foreperson and look to that person for direction. This is how humans naturally form hierarchies.)
This is a mischaracterization of juries. It's not a hierarchy. Every juror has an equal vote. And each juror gets paid the same, including the foreperson (not much, but they usually get paid something for their service).
The foreperson has two special roles: (1) to announce the verdict in court and (2) to guide the deliberations. Neither of those roles has any personal benefit to the foreperson. The second role exists merely to keep deliberations orderly, prevent them from devolving into cacophony and chaos. And in fact the foreperson is charged with making sure that every juror is allowed their input, otherwise one or a small number of jurors might dominate the discussion. Some kind of order is needed in group discussions. This is why Robert's Rules of Order exists, for example.
Democracy itself always requires some form of order: people entrusted with scheduling, administering, and counting the votes. But that doesn't make these people our leaders.
I'd much rather have a person there who doesn't need the money vs. one who does.
You want your pay to be higher? Work to raise the median salary in your state.
Will the salary cap prevent a congressman’s daughter from accepting a lucrative job offer? Will his wife’s law firm have to turn away new clients? Will his non-profit have to turn away donations?
Any system that could prevent personal enrichment of elected officials would require every freedom be taken away from them. You’d have to imprison them (and anyone who could proxy wealth for them) as soon as they take office and for decades after if you want to be sure that they were not motivated by self interest.
https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2024 Singapore is number 3 for the most recent report. USA by comparison is number 28. It’s an apples and oranges comparison given the vast differences in the two countries of course, and raising politician’s salaries isn’t a black and white fix for the problems in the USA.
We could make it something like 10x the median salary and still have the alignment you want, but would be more resistant to that effect.
Congressional salaries should be $1m+. It would only half a billion dollars a year. A pittance of the $6.75 trillion federal budget.
Combine that high salary with mandatory life sentences for accepting any form of graft and you have a recipe for honest people to enter government. Pretty much the Singapore model for compensation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_Singapore
The problem with low or median salaries for politicians is the ratio of power to compensation. It directly encourages the griftiest of grifters to accept the low salary and abuse their positions of power.
With a high enough salary, you will attract honest people who will do the job functions knowing that any deviation from working on behalf of the people will not only make you broke, it will land you in prison for life.
That's what this purports to solve. By having the direct compensation for being an elected member of Congress be high enough that it would provide a well compensated life for someone who is not rich before becoming a politician.
Now don't get me wrong, given how often legislation in the USA and the UK seems to get rubber-stamped by members of the legislative body who did not (and in some cases could not have) actually read it, I think there's something structurally wrong with at least these two governments, where the senators and MPs are more like overpaid customer support agents and less like the legal/constitutional equivalent of software engineers doing code review or maintaining system architecture, but conditional on if we actually want the elected representatives to be the people's preferred choices amongst the best legal minds available, we have to pay enough to encourage… actually, even before that, even just to get the attention of the top m=contested_seats candidates whose views allow them to comfortably be members of each of the n=num_parties.
Now, I don't know what that pay rate is, and ChatGPT's guess would be better than mine, so the best I can do is link to a page that I only found because ChatGPT gave me a searchable phrase, "magic circle law firm": https://www.allaboutlaw.co.uk/school-leaver-law-careers/beco...
That suggests >>£1M/year in the UK. I assume the USA is more.
Consider: would you take a 90% pay-cut to do your current day job but for the public good?
(I know, not exactly what you meant though.)
What are your criteria for a "high quality candidate"?
I personally would start with honest, ethical, and selfless.
(Yes, I have no idea how you could architect such a system without having it easily gamed)
Or maybe the other way around: the ones most likely to run are the ones that shouldn't be in office.
Yeah, either way, you could probably do a lot worse than a national lottery. (Perhaps requiring some level of education but that's about it.)
In this case, start with knowing that rayiner is a lawyer who was a lobbyist for telcos… so his definition may be biased.
We're talking about politics. It's a game that simply does not select for those attributes.
We all would like altruistic bankers and energetic, ambitious DMV workers, too.
There are many people with those qualities, but you will not find them in those fields.
No, it's deadly serious.
> that simply does not select for those attributes.
I agree that it does not select for those attributes. Whether that's a simple matter is debatable, though perhaps it is simple: in the political system I live under, elections are pay-to-play and self-funded, inherently favoring candidates who can raise vast sums of money and thereby encouraging political corruption.
> We all would like altruistic bankers and energetic, ambitious DMV workers, too.
Note that these are not elected positions.
It is also a game, with players and objectives, and zero-sum outcomes for the players. You either get elected, or you don't, and it's up to each player to decide what they are willing to do in order to win.
I'll await your answer to my question about your criteria before I answer this unfortunately phrased follow-up.
Actually, I won't wait: Democracy depends on voters getting what they voted for. It's essential that there's consistency between a candidate's election campaign and the elected representative's behavior in office, otherwise you might as well vote for Mickey Mouse for all it matters. So yes, I'd take a consistent "religious nut" any day over someone who sells their soul to the highest bidder.
I have respect for people who do what they say and say what they mean, even if they don't agree with me. I have no respect for liars and con artists, regardless of their "intelligence" or "skill". The latter will always screw over the people they were elected to represent.
That only works if each vote has the same worth in the election and governing. Otherwise the whole population might be getting something that only a small number voted.
Do you think that is the case today in the United States? Or are you unaware of all of the gerrymandering currently going on throughout the country?
But Congress is a national body. Maryland is almost the exact flip of Tennessee (2:1 democrat) and democrats have gerrymandered the state so there's only 1 GOP district. Republicans have 35% of the vote, but only 12% of the representatives. At the end of the day, Congressional votes aren't taken state-by-state, and the delta between each party's share of the two-party popular vote and their share of seats typically is small.
There's no fair way to do districting. "Independent" redistricting commissions don't work. In California, which has an independent redistricting commission, republicans have just 17% of the seats despite getting 39% of the vote. It's not that much better than Illinois's extreme gerrymander, where the GOP got only 17% of seats with 46% of the popular vote.
If we mandated districts be drawn by independent commissions in every state, they'd get taken over by democrats, just like every other non-elected institution (everything from NPR to the ABA). At least the adversarial political process we have now results in relatively small, non-permanent advantages to either side. The only solution would be to ban districts all together and have a statewide vote for a party slate of candidates.
Or perhaps you were thinking that I was presenting a sufficient condition for democracy rather than a necessary condition for democracy?
For the most part, the problem is not back alley “corruption.” It’s people trying to not rock the boat too much so they can exit to something reasonable when the kids need to go to college.
The reason that legislators don't rock the boat is that they're paid by their wealthy campaign contributors to not rock the boat. But the reality is usually not honest candidates getting corrupted; rather, the wealthy campaign donors specifically select candidates who are naturally amenable to their interests, and give them boatloads of money (and needless to say, would stop giving them boatloads if they failed to do what the contributors wanted). It's a trade of money for political power, between willing parties. The political system, as it is, attracts and benefits those who are already corrupt or corruptible.
Increasingly, members of Congress are already wealthy even before taking office, so they never had any fear of paying for college. Stock trading itself is largely a luxury of the wealthy. Even those people of lesser means who do own stock typically don't trade it directly but have it managed for them by a pension or retirement fund.
The rule should be: One has to give up dream to become rich if they want to become congressmen. They should be able to live like a middle class, but not rich.
Also they need to have term limit.
That’s the way it should be. If they’re in it for a big pile of cash, they should go the proper routes. We’d be better off if our expectations were that politics does not pay well, and a politician that retires wealthy has not been a good public servant.
I'm sorry, but what? Are you proposing that being a member of Congress should come with legal insider trading as part of their compensation package?
That's downright abhorrent. Where on Earth are you getting the impression there should be a class of people uncovered by the constraints we put on literally everyone else?
1) Paying people more won't help corruption
2) You get what you pay for
So, both can be right and wrong at the same time.
I think that we need to pay them a lot more. Running and serving in congress is a hell of dumb idea for anyone that we'd want in the position. Your life gets pulled apart by the press, you spend absurd amounts of money just to get there, and you essentially have to quit your career and buy a house/condo in DC for an indeterminate timeline, you get yelled at. Smart people would not do this job; it really is a service for the people they represent. [0]
This really only allow the corrupt and the already wealthy to do the job. Issues there are obvious.
Look, the labor theory of value is wrong. Something is not worth what went into it (capital, labor, R&D, etc). Something is worth what you pay for it. This is why you don't see a lot of marxists about these days, because prices are determined by the market, not the production.
Same thing goes for CEOs and politicians. They are not worth what they produce (mostly headaches). They are worth what it takes to get them there. If you want a good one to run and try for election, then you have to make it worth their time relative to their other options. You want a good one? You have to pay exponentially.
Pro sports understands this. Sure, you can get a lot of people playing NFL any Sunday for like $10; they'll do it just for the crowds and the dream. Nearly all of them will suck. But if you incentivize correctly ($$$), then you get a much better game and viewing experience than a Sunday afternoon beer league. Better politicians means better incentive structures.
[0] campaign finance reform is also desperately needed, but that's another related subject.