“Captain Gains” on Capitol Hill
nber.org
nber.org
Their finances should be monitored and heavily restricted. No one should think of money as a benefit of civil service
Anyone capable of doing the above competently can make 10+ million per year in the private sector. Underpaying for these positions simply invites corruption or plutocracy.
Only because that's become the normalised way of 'winning', ironically where society generally loses because being 'friends with every important person in your state' generally means you pander to them in a way that costs everyone else.
Having had that rant, I don't know a better way, and your description is what US politics has (d)evolved to over time; water finding its own level.
There's a very thorny line we'd have to draw there re: speech and protection--what's a forbidden PAC and what's a citizen who chooses to use their time and resources to support a candidate they like? I happen to believe that we as a country should trace that line rather than falling back on constitutionally-protected-speech absolutism, but I'm aware that's a minority opinion and unlikely to ever bear fruit.
That's actually probably the best reason for someone to get involved in civil service. If the salary is lucrative enough, the incentive to stay in office will be high and, importantly, money won't be a factor keeping people from getting into office.
The problems we currently have is:
- Money is an incentive to get into office, but that money comes from interaction with wealthy individuals.
- Nothing stops congress people from leveraging their public actions into lucrative private industry.
- Independently wealthy individuals have a much easier time getting elected than an average citizen.
Think of it this way, if the salary is 0, then you effectively lock out all but the wealthy from office. If the salary is just enough to get by, that still locks out potentially qualified people simply because they can get better jobs out of congress. But if it's a lucrative salary, then you not only make it so people can make it in congress, they can be more competitive against a wealthy competition. They also don't need things like "contributions" to stay afloat. You'd simply be less tempted to take a $10k bribe if it jeopardizes your $1m salary. That alone significantly raises the barrier for bribery.
But we should do that in tandem with cutting off obvious corruption routes. Being a representative should mean you can't work in private industry for 10 years. You should only be allowed to trade 2 ETFs, an all stock and all bond ETF. And the insider trading laws should result in immediate expulsion from congress.
If you select those people, what’s to keep them from creating a system that gives them ever more amounts of money, to the detriment of their constituents?
Maybe a better system for selecting civil servants is…I dunno…a system that optimizes for that “service” part? It’s shocking how in the last few decades we’ve convinced ourselves that money is the only filter that motivates people and is the inherent driver of all human action.
That is literally the system that exists today, except instead of in the open (e.g. salary) it's through stocks with insider information and who knows how else.
The point isn't to optimize for people who are most incentivized through money, the point is to make the position more accessible for anyone who actually wants to do the "service" part, and to minimize the reasons that it's hard. As the previous commenter pointed out, right now independently wealthy people are some of the only ones who are actually capable of running, and someone who isn't independently wealthy who wins is even more susceptible to bribes because they may be in a tenuous financial position.
I would agree with you that we want individuals who's goal is to do "service" for their society, but our current system obviously isn't working and there are a lot of solid reasons why something like this _could_ improve the situation, what alternatives would you recommend?
Agreed. But the difference is I'm saying a better solution is to adjust the incentives rather than just keeping the same incentives but making it more transparent.
I would be in favor of higher pay for Congress given the limits of the job (maintaining at least two residences in DC and their home state, for example). Perhaps we just disagree on the level. I don't want it to be "lucrative" as you said originally (ie I don't want it to be a way to get rich), but it should be high enough to not be prohibitive to go into service. There are also some knock-on effects that would need to be managed; for example, I think overall civil servant pay is pegged to Congressional pay limits. Other solutions may be to have designated Congressional housing (so at least they can't use the housing cost as an excuse).
A question to ask yourself is "How much money would I have to pay Trump as the President for him to not launch a cryptocoin in his name?"
And a similar question is "If we paid the dockworkers to stay home so that we could containerize, would the guys staying home consider themselves striking when we consider automating?"
There is an answer, and it seems that if you pay a guy who had a large appetite for money a lot of money it doesn't diminish his appetite for more money all that much.
Once you have paid him the Danegeld
You never get rid of the DaneIt seems entirely reasonable to me that an individual could mis-remember their dealings of ~49k when they're worth billions.
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> And a similar question is "If we paid the dockworkers to stay home so that we could containerize, would the guys staying home consider themselves striking when we consider automating?"
Alternatively, if we went back to the optimal point of the Laffer tax curve (roughly 75% for top bracket). Then it doesn't need to be the Port of LA paying people to sit at home, it can just be the government providing paid job training and etc so the workers aren't on the streets when they're fired.
It's like saying you should wear a rain coat because it's 60 degrees outside. And then when I point out they're unrelated you go "it's also raining". No duh wear a raincoat but you didn't say that at the start.
I think we can agree that Elon Musk is (1) a household name (2) a fairly large number of people globally know him. However, if you want to make an argument about how to move your legs while running he's not the guy to pick as an example.
Like take the original post and just remove the second sentence about Martha. It still works just fine.
vs present situation of it being a pure liability for financial gain, to seek the office.
the nice thing about common sense beatings is the cost of prison, housing, food, etc. is all zero, and the whole prison political topic is a non-issue. beatings are in fact extremely efficient, effective, and cheap, which is why lee kwon yew adopted them
That’s how you get Disneyland, as a matter of fact.
If you’ve never figured out why those places have a noticeably different vibe, that’s a big part of it.
Statist-type demographics love Disney, now that I’m thinking about it a bit…
That is the actual problem, and you're not fixing it by stopping them from buying stocks.
I think that one died in committee: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/5106
There’s another from earlier this year (https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1908...) that is currently being pushed by a Republican member from Florida. It was blocked by the Speaker. There’s currently a discharge petition: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-resolutio...
Over the summer, Josh Hawley of all people introduced a similar bill in the Senate.
The way America was designed may have been pretty novel / innovative at the time but we've learned so much since then about how to build better democracies. Switzerland has a council of seven members as their executive branch, not a single person. It's brilliant stuff. I worry that the only way to do better is through an incredibly painful collapse of things. Unless politicians start deciding to write laws that force them to give up power. Which seems almost humorous to suggest.
> The way America was designed may have been pretty novel / innovative at the time but we've learned so much since then about how to build better democracies.
Well, a lot of dysfunction in government is the result of later evolution, whether evolution of circumstances or of government.
As an example, the combination of senate filibuster (which was around from the earliest days) with the reconciliation workaround (which is pretty recent) results in omnibus bills, which is a well-known driver of partisanship (because you don't talk to the other party at all in order to pass your bill on the floor), and also has significant consequences to individual responsibility (for the same reason, that omnibus bill must pass for your party to do anything, so you can't be faulted for voting for it, and instead you look for carve outs for your interests. If you do decide to hold up the whole bill like the freedom caucus tried, then you get everyone against you and you will eventually fold).
This also has repercussions that for things that can't go through reconciliations, just because the usual way of doing things involves more party dependence (than it would to pass bills another way). This of course also gives more power to those running the party within the chambers of congress.
My point is that things evolve, and people tend to try to explain the current state of things with reference to the 18th century, and while I definitely believe we should evolve systems to be better, we shouldn't ignore evolution that's already occurred.
The problem with the democrats - indeed why Trump is in office - is they focus on social issues of "the underdog group" at the exclusion of all else. It's simplistic, arbitrary, and fraught with moral hazards and perverse incentives, often with someone getting screwed over.
I don't care what you call "the underdog group" it is what you think it is. Sex, age, race, citizenship status, disability status, etc. There is a fundamental issue with this sort of things - it reduces humans to simplistic labels and groups and pronounces policy based on group means. The black lesbian woman. The white hetero man. Well... is the white hetero man, is he an orphan and also deaf, meanwhile the black lesbian woman grew up in a wealthy neighborhood and is the epitome of health? But then like a social median dark pattern, this becomes a political dark pattern - identity politics, voter blocs, good guy and bad guy - people get swept up in these bizarre sort of human inherited sin ontology structures which don't really capture the true suffering, or true privilege, that simply exists and varies individual to individual, versus subgroup average to subgroup average.
Any data scientist could tell you if you have 300 features and have free reign to choose subgroups - yea it's going to be easy to find a subgroup that's crushing it and a subgroup that's failing
I guess the way to start is by shaming these obviously corrupt officials and practices. Much like racism, people don't mind being corrupt but they seem to mind being _called_ corrupt.
The only reason people make money off of stocks is because at the end, someone gives those companies money. And everyone has a choice to vote with their wallets and through their actions in general.
For example, take Elon and his actions over the past few years. What should have happened is that Tesla sales dropped across the board, and everyone who owns a Tesla should have been in a rush to sell it for fear of it getting scratched or them personally blacklisted from stuff and ridiculed for driving a Tesla. Tesla employees should also have faced the same public pressure and quit.
But people don't care - at the end of the day, politics on Capitol hill is mostly a meme, but what matters is their personal satisfaction. And you look ridiculous if you refuse to get in your coworkers Tesla. So now Elon is a trillionaire.
On the flip side, in a capitalistic sense, it honestly doesn't matter if people are rich, the thing that should matter is what power the money gives them. Rich people buying mansions is a good thing - thats money to workers for construction, staff for housekeeping, and so on. Rich people doing things like being able to buy whole media platforms and censoring things is definitely not good though.
The question is, is society headed in a direction where people have more and more apathy and eventually nothing will matter as things get progressively worse and everyone is just complacent, or is there a bottom line where people start paying attention enough and actually fighting for change when it gets bad enough.
No- it's what the rich and powerful want and they have forced their ways on everyone because there's nothing we can do to stop it.
The choice people have is not between a dictator and no dictator, it's between a dictator and a period of instability and chaos, possibly including bloody fighting or even famine, the outcome of which is (a) completely uncertain even in the unlikely event that you know that ~everyone wants the dictator gone and (b) might be that the dictator's forces still come out on top, or that someone even worse is installed into power.
This ‘voting with your wallet’ argument always ignores the problem of collective action. Even if every individual would prefer the bad companies to not exist (or at least to not behave the way they do), the rational choice is still to purchase products from them if their product is superior and/or cheaper.
Take something like Walmart or Amazon. I think a majority of people dislike the way they do business (the way they treat their employees, the environment, and competitors), but the only choice a consumer has is “shop there and get the cheaper prices, and the company continues to exist like it does” or “don’t shop their, pay more money for things, and the company continues to exist like it does”
Me, as an individual customer, can’t make the company stop existing in its current form. They aren’t going to miss my business. It isn’t even a rounding error on their balance sheet. My only choice is to get the cheaper prices or not.
Even if the company would change if everyone stopped shopping, I don’t get to make that choice. Hell, if everyone else is stopping shopping there and they are going to go out of business, it is STILL in my best interest to shop their while I can and save the money… it isn’t like my business is going to SAVE them any more than it will kill them.
You can’t kill a business practice by voting with your wallet.
The only time consumer choice will work is when the individual consumer has a better alternative; if I get a better PERSONAL experience (either cheaper or a better product) by shopping somewhere else, then voting with your wallet makes sense and will work (because everyone will have the same incentive). Companies won’t be punished for their external costs by their customers, since the customers aren’t choosing to suffer those costs or not; they suffer the external costs no matter what, they only can choose to enjoy the benefits or not. Why suffer the external costs AND not even get to enjoy the benefits?
This is why change has to come from some binding collective action (like legislation or regulation or something), not individual consumer choice.
If as a society, we were more willing to police ourselves, you would see real change. In the end, acceptance of peers is the number one fundamental drive for a lot of people past basic needs.
Small quibble. The reason why people make money off stocks is largely because people think people will give those companies in the future. People aren’t just trading on dividends, they’re trading on PE ratios.
Otherwise, companies like Tesla would be worth much less than Toyota (which gets more revenue, higher gross profit, and higher profit margins).
Tesla becomes a power and taxi company, diversified away from the car sales
I think what’s really a meme is the idea that withholding payment is the defacto way of creating accountability towards a stakeholder that you don’t like, since its not and also doesn't work
Its goofy and cringe that the left has made that their whole identity, only to spend half of their adult life slowly noticing it doesn't work while isolating their prior friends that dont participate in the process
If you look at polling this is not what the majority want
Since much of this truth is merely rhetorical, socialized truth, not immutable physics, the fix is to propagate a new narrative about how the economy works, how politics work, and threaten the elders the way they threaten the youth. They are older and weaker naturally. End the one sided ageism
As long as the majority of people are comfortable while being apathetic they will not care. They will happily maintain that status quo. When things get uncomfortable for the majority, then will there be action. Just make sure the people are fed and entertained just enough and you're safe.
I think you overestimate the number of people who make principled stands on their product buying decisions based on the actions of company executives. I don't think that's the same thing has "people don't care"; I think some people just don't think they should compromise on their needs/wants for what they see as unrelated reasons.
> Tesla employees should also have faced the same public pressure and quit.
In an ideal world, sure. But we live in a country where health insurance is tied to employment and employers, and it's not exactly a wonderful market for job-seekers these days. I expect there were many people at Tesla who were unhappy with Musk and wanted to leave, but felt that the risks of doing so were too high. Again, this is not the same as "people don't care".
> And you look ridiculous if you refuse to get in your coworkers Tesla.
As you should. Making a fuss over this sort of thing when you're all trying to get to an offsite business meeting, or just a group lunch, is eye-rollingly immature.
I fundamentally disagree with your assertion that people are apathetic and don't care. Like with many things, the situation is more complicated than that, and people have to weigh their needs and (personal, financial, etc.) security against whatever principles they may have. On top of that, there are so many things that we "need" to care about and consider, that if we tried to actually take everyone's pet outrage into account, we'd literally do nothing.
And some people don't think it's necessary to group people's politics or general malfeasance with their "art". (E.g., should people stop watching and enjoying movies produced, written, or directed by convicted sexual harassers or abusers? Maybe? But that's an individual decision, and I don't think there's a right or wrong answer there.)
I think there's also an aspect of "who's the loudest shithead today?" going on too. Musk seems like a truly reprehensible person, and I wouldn't buy a Tesla. But what about GM's leadership? What about the history of some German car makers supporting the Nazis back in the 1930s and 40s? Musk is loud about his shittiness, but others are quieter and sometimes their misdeeds go farther in the past.
not to be too pithy, but there's been a pretty major erosion of what most of us probably thought was a relatively safe constant in that regard :(
The middle man scheme you mention would be illegal under OP's idea. So prosecute everyone involved. The more people involved, the harder to hide it.
Your argument is basically "it doesn't make sense to have murder be illegal because the law won't prevent the bullet from flying."
This is pervasive in China; the politicians kid is the middleman. One child policy, so there's at most one kid -- makes it easy to know who to give the stock tips to.
Bernie Sanders is not the president of the United States.
Sure. It's impossible to prevent all crime. But that doesn't mean that rules and restrictions around what you can and can't do are useless. The existing rules for prohibiting insider trading when it comes to corporate executives work decently well; we should just expand those to apply to people in Congress (and make it apply to all securities for them).
It won't catch everything, but it will help. A lot.
At minimum they shouldn't be allowed to trade individual stock. I don't think this stops workarounds but it's the least we could do.
> how leveraged her trades are
People keep talking about how wildly Pelosi beats the market. You could beat Pelosi! Just go all-in on NVDA. Max out your margin limit to do it. So long as tech stays on a bull run, you're a genius.
Of course, you'll eventually lose your shirt. This is the problem with "the Pelosi tracker" stuff. Your risk tolerance is not that of the Pelosis: Paul Pelosi has spent decades in venture capital and they've allocated a small portion of their portfolio to very long bets on tech. If tech craters, they're fine. You aren't.
That's the "secret" to their success.
Just require people in Congress to follow the same process, but for any stock, bond, ETF, etc.
They shouldn't be allowed to trade stocks. When you do so, corruption is inevitable. It should be an expected price of public service that you remove yourself from most other ambitions.
I'd hope that if they were required to live off of their (rapidly depreciating) savings and income, like most Americans, they might consider some of their legislative choices differently.
Countries like Singapore already figured out that if you pay public servants very well you can attract high quality people to government jobs.
If you make part of the job requirements that you sacrifice your retirement and financial well being for the good of the country you’re just targeting a type of politician you wish existed, not real people.
> I'd hope that if they were required to live off of their (rapidly depreciating) savings and income
The problem with your line of thinking is that “they” is not a fixed set of candidates. If you forced them to have “rapidly depreciating” financial states to take the job, you’d lose a lot of candidates. I know you’d like to imagine they’d be replaced by perfect utopian candidates who only have your best interests in mind, but in reality if you make people financially desperate they’re actually more likely to look for ways to commit fraud for self-benefit. Imagine the desperate lawmaker watching their family’s retirement “rapidly depreciate” who gets a visit from a lobbyist who can get their kid a sweet $200K/yr do-nothing job if they can just slip a little amendment into a law.
The populist movement to punish lawmakers is self-defeating.
So insider trading is not a thing among Singapore's ruling class?
e.g.,
Singapore PM annual salary: ~$1.63 million USD
Singapore President salary: ~$1.14 million USD
Personally I never considered a career in the public sector mostly because there is an expectation in my country (US) that I would be poorly compensated.
The only acceptable leader is someone who was born so rich that he leads as a hobby.
Holding index funds seems reasonable (Total Stock Market, S&P 500)... not a huge sacrifice imo
I am wondering why i don't hear anything like: if a church or group representing a church get involved with politics, through lobbying or any other type of means, their tax free status is revoked and they are treated like a normal entity.
it seems like a similar type of thing that in my eyes at least, is a no brainer, but is just as likely to be chopped down because of how our current system functions.
I see this argument a lot, but I think it treats people as uniform input-output machines. Singapore is successful in this regard because of much more severe and very real penalties for corruption, and because not "everyone does this". You can't bribe immoral people into behaving morally, because in the absence of morals they have no incentive not to just take your bribe and keep doing what they're doing.
A significant number of corrupt public "servants" are multi-millionaires, no amount of money will ever be enough for them.
One objection could be this: but what if we hire unqualified people. The counterargument: do you think are current legislators are more or less qualified than an average person?
Another objection: but what if they don’t want to do it? Counterargument: when a juror does not want to be on a case, they are almost always dismissed from it. Doesn’t mean you get to skip jury duty, just that you don’t get to do that one.
One last one: this will disrupt those people’s lives. Counter argument: what Congress is and isn’t doing right now is disrupting everyone’s lives as are lobbyists and special interest groups.
Something similar has been done in Ireland with their assemblies. And I do think that if you cannot convince 535 randomly selected average citizens that a law should be passed, that law is probably not worth passing.
Democracy is a terrible form of government. It’s just that it is about 5x better than anything else we have invented so far. Doesn’t mean we should stop looking for a better system.
These random people will have to rely on experts a lot for knowledge they lack on any topic, because the world is complex. Now, these experts can be biased, bought, influenced etc. Or be accused of being in some sort of "Deep State" if you're into that.
But then again, this can already be the case, now I counter-countered myself.
If you wanted an alternative system: you could always have a professional group of law writers and a professional group of law opposers try to present arguments to a large assembly of law jurors. If they can’t get 2/3rds majority on a law, it doesn’t pass. This is better than something like direct democracy where everyone votes on an issue because you can’t get the voters’ attention on any one thing for more than a few minutes or a few hours at the most (except a small fraction for whom it is their life for a while). In this law jury setup you can properly brief them.
You could have some other body of professional governors who do things like emergency resolutions and maybe basic budget stuff but anything beyond that goes to the assembly for approval. You could create a new assembly as often as every 6 weeks and process a batch of laws at once so that you really rotate out the jurors before they can be influenced. And selection of law writers and law opposers can be something that is reviewed by this kind of assembly too, or just some large pool of professionals who are chosen at random for any given period of time and given the power to present before the assembly. A lot of options here for how to amortize bad behavior such that over the long haul it averages out to close to zero.
The legislature, however, is not there just to nod its head when they think something is a good idea and voting no when it's not. Even if we were to create a space for exactly that, all we've done is push the fallibility to those who are doing the work to write and revise law--but now they're pitching to those off the streets who don't know anything about governance! If anything, lay congresspeople would magnify, not reduce, the problems we have with our current system.
If we had national assemblies by sortition every 2 years, I would worry that the the tail (the current structure of Congressional support staff) would wag the dog. A better system would need to be designed to enable good decision-making.
In modern times, sortition sometimes shows up in some deliberative democracy proposals.
The US government could not be managed by Athenian sortition any more than it could be by Athenian direct democracy -- the citizenry is too different, the questions too complex.
However, just as the Romans evolved their original Athenian-style direct democracy into representative democracy as their empire grew and became more heterogeneous, sortition has similarly evolved into deliberative democracy.
There is no historical precedent for our democratic system. Not Romans, Greeks, or 13 colonies. Why cite them?
Nobody has ever had a system with 300 million people having almost direct voting while simultaneously having no definition of a citizen besides “born here”.
I’m skeptical. The Trump/Fetterman/RFK phenomenon is the fruit of this democracy, not an unlikely aberration.
Does the average citizen even understand discounted cash flows or opportunity cost? And not to mention legal concepts I’m ignorant of.
I don’t see why lowering the quality of candidates by 10x would improve things.
I’m not saying that makes them great. But if you want to see the pool of average citizens walk into a Walmart or DMV outside the Bay Area.
I admire your optimism but saying it doesn't make it so.
We elect people able to convince others they should be elected. Often that means they possess the ability to convince others they have the skills, knowledge, and expertise you describe.
If you think that's the same thing as actually having skills, knowledge, and expertise, well, I have bad news for you...
Most random people off the street would be as capable as a US senator if they spent decades doing it.
https://www.kennedy.senate.gov/public/2025/9/kennedy-calls-f...
https://edition.cnn.com/2015/02/26/politics/james-inhofe-sno...
Or an even older one: https://rollcall.com/2018/02/16/flashback-friday-a-series-of...
We are definitely not sending our brightest.
That’s not an ordinary person even if we think his health views are dumb.
got into Harvard
(Cannot resist the legally blonde reference)
https://www.stuff.co.nz/politics/350541328/watch-national-le...
My sense is that people who advocate for sortition find it attractive not because they believe that the average citizen is more intelligent or better informed than the average career politician, just less corrupt.
Setting aside whether that's even true, I'm not sure whether it would be better to live in a country run by honest idiots or corrupt experts.
If anyone doesn't like that number (435), there's already a constitutional amendment to bump it up to 6000ish. It's been ratified by 12 states, so only 26 more needed. Call your state legislator today and ask why they're not ratifying it.
(In seriousness, they'd be forced to explore other solutions, possibly even regional capitols with some sort of high-tech teleconferencing. Anything that decentralizes and claws back power from DC can't be a bad thing if you ask me.)
More, obviously. Almost a third of the US House and half the Senate are lawyers. Less than three tenths of a percent of Americans have a JD.
But also have you see some of the laws written by them? I am not saying we need to dumb it down, but the fact that an average person who is governed by these laws cannot comprehend these laws is probably not the most desirable quality in a legal system.
Congressmen get paid 170K/year, get pension after only 5 years (MTG is leaving just after she becomes eligible), plus they only work like 6 months in a year, right? Not sure about healthcare and other benefits. While they can't get rich on this salary, this does seem pretty decent salary and perks, right?
How do other democracies solve this problem?
EDIT: You will notice a lot of talk about high pay. It's important to note that this is not without major punishment for financial mismanagement. You can't have one without the other, it's not just a question of giving politicians a bigger trough to put their snout in.
> Countries like Singapore already figured out that if you pay public servants very well you can attract high quality people to government jobs.
I'd be okay letting them invest in S&P500 and that's about it.
https://www.hawley.senate.gov/hawley-advances-pelosi-act-to-...
If all the options on the ballot are scoundrels, which seems to often be the case, you're kinda stuck.
The current lag timed reporting requirement is a decent start, but fact of the matter is that it still allows Reps to take advantage of insider knowledge to profit and thereby basically be bribed in circuitous ways not really all that different than a mobster/teamster accidentally leaving behind a suitcase of cash after they dinner party the politician invited him to, just even more obfuscated and structured.
Or another way to state my point: voters are getting exactly the politicians they voted for. There is no majority-constituency that seeks a different group - because majority voters already have the ballot power to select different politicians.
As Milton Friedman said:
What is important is not the particular person who is elected President or the party he belongs to. I have often said we shall not correct the state of affairs by electing the right people; we’ve tried that. The right people before they’re elected become the wrong people after they’re elected. The important thing is to make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. If it is not politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either.Federal US politician incentives are pretty much designed for corruption.
I would say jokes aside but the political system promotes this corruption.
That said, there should be national minimum standards for the elections.
Chain of custody is something all elections adhere to in the US, but if it's not a federal requirement, it should be.
What's really needed are hand marked paper ballots, electronically counted using open, independently audited machines with no network connectivity (obviously). "Scantron" style machines That should be a minimum requirement.
Nobody stole the election from the doddering old fool in 2020. Internet bullshit doesn't stand up in court where they do have evidence standards.
Edit: Back on topic ... individual stock trading by representatives clearly should be illegal. And apparently we need more independent watchdogs with better protections against a puppet who mindlessly goes along with the last person to manipulate them.
Nah.
We just love our dog whistles.
Abortion!!
Immigrants!!
The billionaires are stealing from you!!
Libtards!!
Right wing shooters!!
Oh yeah, almost forgot..
Something, something blacks!!!
That's how you win elections these days.
You can try to win an election on something substantive, say, infrastructure repair and updates for instance. But the wedge issue fueled campaigns are gonna wipe the floor with you.
We the people have voted on this over and over. The data is irrefutable. We love our wedge issues.
To be clear, because I know it will come up - not saying both parties are the same, but I am saying they are both doing the oligarch's bidding. The US government is now fully captured by billionaires and is currently being used for personal enrichment of those in power.
I don't know if that's realistic or not as the electorate has already shown they don't care enough to vote their representatives out for doing it and it's unlikely that current members would restrict their earnings. I guess it's good that we know about it, at least.
George Washington was paid 4x Trump, I believe.
In the context of corruption cleanup, I think people understand that paying people well avoids corruption. Mexican cops, that sort of thing.
Yes, not popular, but important.
After all, how much do you have to pay the world's richest man to keep things above board, I wonder?
The problem arises from how we run elections. It's very hard to dislodge an incumbent when the small group of people voting in a primary are very biased, and then the people voting in the general election really don't want the candidate from the other party.
I suggest reading "Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America" by Lee Drutman.
https://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Two-Party-Doom-Loop-Multipar...
Instead, we need approval voting, or even STAR voting. https://www.equal.vote/
(Drutman appears to have somewhat changed his views on RCV, but I don't think his "fusion voting" idea will catch on until we have multiple parties in the first place. https://www.newamerica.org/political-reform/blog/how-i-updat... )
Somehow I have a feeling the problem is not the system, but the culture...
Which nation, may I ask?
Bernie snuggles up to the democrat party because even being extremely popular doesn't ensure you will be re-elected if you don't run a campaign.
The 2024 and 2020 elections cost $15 and $18 billion dollars. We literally spend more than it costs to build an aircraft carrier, for no reason. An entire industry exists to suck up that money every 2-4 years. All that money comes from rich "donors", who always want to ask how you feel about <X> before agreeing to give you that money instead of your competitor.
Most countries have strict limits on how much you can spend on campaigns, and limit how early you can start campaigning. Only in the US do you have to endure presidential campaign adverts in off years.
Only in the US have we decided it's wrong to prevent the rich from totally controlling our electoral process through their wealth and resources.
This no limits system means our politicians aren't even up for sale, they are up for auction. Can you outbid Dupont the next time regulation comes up for forever chemicals?
Many people agree with Bay Area's idea that people making less than $105k are poor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46036803
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RL30064#:~:text=The%20c...
We see this in the UK, the exact same argument. Yet I was paid more to manage a small tech team than an MP for fewer hours. You actively disincentivise people like me from taking public positions. I'm doing tech contracting and earn more than Prime Minister.
The UK gets about a trillion dollars a year in, and spends more. The US takes in something like five trillion dollars.
An exceptionally small improvement in improving the economy pays for itself indefinitely because these countries are absolutely enormous. Our MPs are paid about 90k/year, if you could improve the tax take of the government by 0.1% by improving the economy in some way *once* you could pay them £1M/year *tax free* and you could pay that *forever* even if future people aren't as good they're just not actively detrimental. This is also for paying people who aren't actually making big decisions, just the elected representatives.
Money should not be an issue, missing a good person because of the money is utter insanity given the payback.
Also, giving politicians legitimate income makes them less susceptible to bribery and other forms of unethical income.
And you are arguing against strawmen. Please point to an example of two of current Congress reps telling poor people "Stop buying starbucks? Pull yourself up by the bootstraps!"
> So at this point we should have to beg people and incentivize them with astronomical salaries to not be a piece of shit? I think this is just the product of late stage capitalism. Nobody gives a fuck about anything besides money and how to get more of it.
This is the deeply naive view. It is not begging to pay market rate for top talent. The most capable people who we should want to run our government are worth far, far more on the open market than the current salary levels we pay Congress. If we want those people to consider Congress a viable option, we need to pay them accordingly. See Singapore for a strong example of this.
> $200k a year doesn't even get you a nice 1 bedroom apartment in many of the cities these representatives represent.
> Let alone pay for the 2 separate residences that they effectively need to maintain.
And no, the US gov't does not give them free housing in DC. Learn some of the basics before you start weighing in.
We have several high tech companies as well as a pro sports team that perpetually influence politics to the city’s detriment, and the stooges that get put on our ballot each election are simply under-equipped to combat them.
The chief of police summons a recently enrolled policeman in his office: "The accounting called, and apparently you never picked your pay cheques in the last 6 months? What's up with that?" ― "Wait, we get paid? I thought it was, you get the badge and then gun, and then you're on your own!"
The things with jokes, however, is that they probably should not become reality.
So instead they hire a city manager who basically runs everything, at a much higher salary, which meets budget rules since they could in theory fire him if they run out of money. Hence the city manager is an unelected strong executive, which is not good for democracy.
It sounds crazy but our whole muni budget is under $5 million. We have almost no infrastructure other than roads (98% of housing is on well water and septic systems, there are no street lights or sewers or the like).
A lot of municipal government in the US is like this. Very small with near-volunteers running everything.
You are right that this rules out a lot of people who can't afford to effectively volunteer for local government. I think mostly this is a good thing.
Occupations like "landlord" and "car dealership owner" are wildly overrepresented in local government because they have high incomes with virtually no time commitment.
These people aren't necessarily unqualified, but their motivation for holding office isn't usually aligned with the needs of the average member of the public.
See also, for example, Singapore, known for fairly low corruption, who pays government heads over $1M per year.
Obama signed the STOCK act into law, but of course, who watches the watchmen? The Restore Trust In Congress Act is sitting there, waiting for Mike Johnson to bring it to a vote.
Paying enough to cover the expenses of the job isn't a solution to all problems, just kind of a minimum bar if we want a normal person to be able do the job without relying on other income sources.
You need to be well connected and/or wealthy before you even start.
The text of the constitution for electing congress says:
> The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States
and there is something similar for the Senate after the 17th amendment. I think pre-17th amendment States may have been able to use Sortion to appoint Senators but it would not have been legally enforceable. The State legislature could pre-commit to elect Senators by Sortition but then they could bail out and just decided to choose who they want when it came to the actual selection.
If your goal is to make it easier to travel to and live in DC, well, congress has the power to address housing (especially in DC) and airline costs for all Americans.
> congress has the power to address ... airline costs for all Americans.
> who watches the watchmen?
Yes, obviously I would support that /s
The idea of increasing pay for members of Congress is that we naturally discourage seeking out other forms of building wealth and/or paying bills while in office regardless of existing laws. You can also have laws that explicitly stop things like insider trading too, but obviously you can't solve for every scenario so this would be a blanket solution.
I understand that corruption can't be solved by this one action and that members can still be corrupt after a pay increase, but on the whole, I think it'd be a positive change. It's a hard problem to solve without burning everything down... which only sounds good in theory and may not result in a better system.
Who's going to draft those laws?
Definitely not the lawmakers who could benefit from this.
See the problem?
CA doesnt care about this -- you continue to re-elected Pelosi, she is one of the worst violators of this
Or at least there would be less - you could only trade on the knowledge of full-market swings rather than per-company swings.
The new leader[1] of the Norwegian wealth fund[2] had a large stock portfolio. There was some debacle given the influential nature of the wealth fund.
He agreed to sell the stocks and buy index funds instead, until he resigned from that position.
As you say, I think that's very reasonable. They can still make money off the general stock market lkkd the rest so they're not disadvantaged, but have very limited opportunity to benefit significantly from inside deals.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolai_Tangen
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...
Lawmakers should be paid enough that they are not destitute, so that low income people are not excluded from participating in government, but the price of power should be that one can not become wealthy during or shortly after their stint. Tax their household 100% on all income and capital gains over the congressional salary (which should be comparable and pegged to the average DC area household income) for their term and over a reasonably small multiple of that salary for 10 years after they leave office. They can insider trade all they want, they can take a cushy job with a company that lobbied them, but all the money they would make by these efforts will go to the people. In practice I think most would not bother. Some people may choose not to go into government because they have better earning opportunities elsewhere, I consider that a feature not a bug. Some may leave office earlier than they otherwise would because they don't like the low income, again that's a good thing. Non-monetary quid pro quo is still an issue, but it's no worse than the current situation and frankly power will always come with perks.
Exempt sitting congresspeople from the change they implement and any of their past potentially ill gotten gains will be exempt from prosecution. Passing a major anti-corruption bill while legalizing your own grift? It may very well pass unanimously.
Having done some reading on this myself I don't think it's the case that Congress as a whole outperforms SPY [1]
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
Or is that one of those, "Of course that exists, but if you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it" kind of things?
Wilhoit was right about everything: America is in-groups who are protected by the law, but not bound by it. Alongside out-groups who are bound by the law, but not protected by it.
You and I? An out-group. And it although we make a lot of jokes about leopards ripping faces off, MAGA know they're an out-group too, it's just that as long as somebody else is getting it worse, they're fine with that.
I'm curious, has anyone done schadenfreude circles, where they measure how much people enjoy watching someone else suffer? I mean, of course they have, that's why we have TV shows like Cops and Jerry Springer, right?
All the Congress member trades are public. There are even ETFs now that track the Congress member trades. So you can just buy such an ETF and have a one-to-one replication of the Congress member portfolio.
It is illegal for Congress to trade on insider information (it just isn't well enforced)
It is NOT illegal to trade based on a list of stocks they bought after the fact. That's not insider information.
https://www.currentmarketvaluation.com/models/s&p500-mean-re...
Yeah, sometimes people can break laws and not get caught. But that's no argument against laws. Some congressmen might be able to hide their investments, but sometimes they'd get caught and plenty of them would not take the risk.
If you work in a financial company which does trading often times you are very restricted in what you could do. You also have to report all of your accounts plus close relatives accounts.
And if you have an insider info and give it to someone else, no matter how remote from you it's still against the law to trade based on that and it's not "fully compliant with every letter of the law"
"After ascension, however, leaders outperform their matched peers by up to 47 percentage points per year"
They looked at the 20 congressional leaders from 1995 to 2021 that traded stocks. They found _up to_ a 47% outperformacnce per year.
It's not clear (without trudging through the data) what the average outperformance was (or if there was any).
Bribery or anything else that affects their lawmaking decisions is significantly worse because the impact is so much larger.
But there is a third option: They are making decisions based on what will move something the most - doesn't matter what, and doesn't matter which way, and doesn't matter for how long. Then they invest in that thing a bit before the decision becomes public that moves that thing.
Don't get me wrong, I think campaign donations or even more explicit bribes are a huge problem, too, but it is already insane to me that you would ban and prosecute "ordinary insider traders" and just let lawmakers do whatever. If presidents have to give up peanut farming, then asking for congressmembers to be utterly decoupled from stock trading decisions is only fair and sensible in my view.
Lawmakers deciding what laws to argue against/for based on how much money it'll get them personally is a benign issue? It's a very hard problem to solve, when the people making the laws have to outlaw behavior that makes them rich, but it's a very worthwhile one if you manage to get it down, because then you'll again get politicians working for the people rather than against.
The GP is right. It's campaign contributions, career rolling doors, and direct payments that make them pick one law over another. Inside trading only let them directly steal money from the population with no strings attached.
The boundaries between corruption, lobbyism, incompetence and nepotism can get very blurry (sometimes even actually representing your constituents interests can look this way!).
But policy makers enriching themselves by insider trading are seen as corrupt by pretty much everyone.
What is the less benign corruption seen in Washington that you feel is most pressing?
It doesn't require us to change our views on areas where we don't agree. It simply requires uniting on the numerous areas where there is common ground.
I don't know about you, but I'm tired of this.
Your average Joe does this and gets ripped away from his family for 10-years. Politicians do it and it gives them job security.
The two-party system amounts to two wings on the same bird. While we're fighting about left vs. right, we're soon going to find ourselves in a new system of lords vs. peasants.
If only Congress and Americans had access to more figures and math, then we would do the right thing. This paper is going to change things. We finally did it.
I'd vote for that person in a heartbeat even if the rest of their platform was non-existent.
His friends, none of whom are elected officials, meanwhile, are making massive options trades before his yo-yo tariff announcements or his Argentinian bailouts, or, or...
That is what brazen corruption looks like, enabled by a corrupt court[1] that has made him unprosecutable.
All this, on the other hand, is what quiet, hidden corruption looks like. All of the people involved here have power and influence and pull, and they use it, but they don't control the DOJ, and aren't actually unprosecutable.
---
[1] And a GOP congress that has handed him (not his office - him) both the power of the purse and the power to unilaterally impose taxes.
If what you’re positing were true wouldn’t they have outperformed their peers before ascension as well
"Earlier studies of lawmakers’ trading by Ziobrowski et al. (2004 and 2011), found their portfolios to outperform the market. However, this conclusion is reversed in later studies. In particular, Eggers and Hainmueller (2013) and Belmont et al. (2022) document the opposite—members of Congress underperform the market during 2004-2008 and 2012-2020, respectively."
I guess the title of "Congress members suck at trading stocks, but suck less once in leadership positions" was already taken
But there are many other interests that heavily influence politicians.
For example, in many districts you can not get elected without the endorsement of certain unions.
It bewilders me that people vote whatever a Union says.
Right now the people entering politics are people who just want more money. They don't care about anything or anyone else. The sooner Americans realize this the better off we'll be.
But I'd definitely be okay with the property part if removing privacy isn't feasible :)
It’s absolutely disgusting that this sort of Insider Trading has been allowed to continue unchecked, and a significant contributor to the normalization of American corruption and its associated regulatory capture.
Be wary of all the third party congressional stock trackers for this reason.
To think of it, there's something tempting in physically separating owning class from ruling class, isn't it?
In any case, I doubt society could successfully enforce this behavior in a contemporary context.
I had never heard of this so I tried to look into it, here's a starting point for anyone else curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9rogeance. It seems like this was true in some countries, like France, but not all, and where they did exist these restrictions were beginning to fall in the 18th century.
Projecting to the modern era, it seems obvious that a societal ruling class would not voluntarily block themselves from the center of power and make themselves irrelevant. Commercial restrictions made sense to them when the main mechanism of gaining power was acquiring and holding land, but they stopped restricting themselves once commercial activities became more important.
> it was a useful tool to avoid conflict of interest
I couldn't find any evidence for this and I find it pretty hard to believe. I don't even think the concept of "avoiding conflicts of interest" would make sense to historic nobility. Their interest was ruling over others, what would be the conflict in amassing wealth to expand their rule?
Edit: For a literal example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waitrose_Duchy_Organic. This is a fairly successful company created by King Charles when he was the Duke of Cornwall, and is still owned by the current Duke. And obviously modern British royalty do own stocks, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finances_of_the_British_royal_..., and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finances_of_the_British_royal_.... These are immense conflicts of interest that nobody seems to be in a hurry to resolve.
Anyone who disagrees must be new to humanity.
Do you get insights early enough or is it too late to turn a profit? Anyone knows how they get the data?
"This fund, which we like to refer to by its trade ticker, “[NANC/GOP],” invests in equity securities purchased or sold by [Democratic/Republican] members of Congress and their spouses
https://subversiveetfs.com/nanc/ https://subversiveetfs.com/gop/
So far my YTD is right in their range. But if leaders have a 47% edge, then I'm interested.
Congressional lawmakers 47% pts better at picking stocks
When I looked at the thread, the top comment was this [1]:
Incorrect title, the finding is "lawmakers who later ascend to leadership positions perform similarly to matched peers beforehand but outperform them by 47 percentage points annually after ascension" This is saying that people in congressional leadership positions do 47% better than other members of Congress.
That top comment then spawned a subthread containing (so far) 212 replies, debating the accuracy of the title and the actual findings of the report.
This is a prime example of why we ask users not to editorialize titles. When people take it upon themselves to write a more “descriptive” title, they often get it wrong, commonly by focusing on a statistic or detail that feels important to them but is not truly reflective of the full contents of the article or findings of the study. But that then becomes the starting point for the discussion, and then much of the discussion thread is responding to the incorrect detail in the title, or is discussing the accuracy of the title, just as has happened here.
If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
For the record, I tried to find a way to word the title in a “descriptive” way, as you had sought to do, but from reading the article and discussion thread I determined that the findings of the study were too detailed and nuanced to be able to summarize in 80 characters, and so the only option was to preserve the paper's original title.
Still, the submission has received 825 upvotes and 550 comments so far, so it's not as if it's been light-on for exposure.
1. Even though a comment about the title may have instigated that 212 reply discussion, the meta discussion about the title was not the focus of those replies.
2. I would suggest that the vast majority of the audience who appreciated the more informative (though not perfect) title couldn't be bothered to participate in a meta discussion about the title.
3. I doubt whether the 800+ people who appreciated the post would have even clicked on it with the completely uninformative original one to which it was reverted. Consequently reverting it does a disservice to the community.
4. An imperfectly descriptive, though neutral, title is clearly better for the community than the opaque original one to which you have reverted it.
5. I did not editorialize the title. I did my best, as you apparently did, within the space constraints to make it more useful to the community.
6. The title which I gave it was a weaker version of the conclusion of the paper, so the opposite of clickbait.
7. Your assertion about the popularity of the submission begs the question of whether it would have been as popular with the reverted title.
I have already experienced the thrill of the 800 upvotes which I propose as evidence that my questioning of the title reversion is meant as a guide for the future rather than an act of karma self-aggrandizement.
To (some of) your points:
> 1. Even though a comment about the title may have instigated that 212 reply discussion, the meta discussion about the title was not the focus of those replies.
Of course. A >200-comment subthread always goes off in all kinds of different directions. But that subthread accounted for 40% of all comments in the thread, so, it's clear that that comment about the title set the tone for the whole thread and heavily influenced how it played out. That top comment pointing out the inaccuracy of the title was one of the very first comments submitted, and received over 300 upvotes, so many people agreed that the title was inaccurate. We can't ignore that signal.
> 4. An imperfectly descriptive, though neutral, title is clearly better for the community than the opaque original one to which you have reverted it.
A title that gives people an incorrect understanding of the finding of the study is not "neutral". And if the authors/publishers of the paper felt that their title was adequately representative of their own work – given they are the most motivated to maximise its exposure – it's not for us to decide their own title was too "opaque".
> 6. The title which I gave it was a weaker version of the conclusion of the paper, so the opposite of clickbait.
We always find that numbers make titles more attention-grabbing. That doesn't mean they should never be used, but they should be used with great caution.
> 7. Your assertion about the popularity of the submission begs the question of whether it would have been as popular with the reverted title.
We're sympathetic with this perspective, and we do see some merit in allowing a more descriptive/catchy title to remain in place for a period of time, while the submission is still fighting for upvotes and the discussion is building momentum.
But every HN thread lives on for posterity, and after it's had enough time to get noticed and establish itself on the front page, it's proper for us to revert the title to the one that the publishers chose, so it ends up being consistent with the original work in perpetuity. This is the respectful thing to do, both for the publishers and for the community. By that time, the fact that it has hundreds of upvotes and comments should be enough to signal to HN visitors that it's worth a look.
And this brings us to the main issue here. I can see the merit in what you tried to do, and I don't altogether disagree with what you did or the reasoning for it, and we didn't initiate any criticism against you for doing it. We just quietly changed the title to the original one when we saw it, which is bog standard HN moderation. It's only become an issue because of the snarky, accusatory way you complained about what we did, and this is becoming a pattern in the way you engage with us. Our moderation policies and practices have to be stable and defensible over time and you need to take that into account when finding fault in what we do.
The right thing to do in future cases like this would be to email us when you submit the post and share your thoughts about the title. We can then manage it in a way that takes into account all the relevant considerations and consequences.
We're now at the point where the most accurate predictor of what the administration and Congress will do comes from stock trades. You want to predict a land war in Venezuela? Just watch defense contractor and energy stocks.
We should force all elected officials and senior public servants to put their assets into a blind trust for their entire term plus two years. They should be forbidden from investing directly. So should their immediate family.
But the problem is so much larger than that. The government as a whole is captured by the donor class. It's so well known that even without an explicit quid pro quo, you and your immediate family will be looked after if you play ball. Vote for tax cuts, deregulation or th einterests of some industry and after your political career, you will have a nice 6 or 7 figure job for life. So will your spouse and children.
What brought the most recent government shutdown to an end? The evidence points to politicals who were beholden to the aviation industry. The disruption to air travel was really starting to bite. Tim Kaine in particular. But it's not just one guy. Chuck Schumer whipped votes to end the shutdown and subbed out John Ossoff who would otherwise face backlack in 2026. Every single Senator who "broke ranks" is either retiring or won't face a primary until 2028 or 2030. That's not an accident and many of them are highly funded by the commericial aviation industry.
What's depressing is how little money it takes to buy our government.
(another post pointed out you can track all this at https://quiverquant.com)
And before anyone mentions she whose name is nauseatingly always mentioned on this subject, here's the list of Congress members by net worth so you get the whole picture instead of just how bad the situation has become.
Because in the end, the mice keep voting the same cats back in.
https://nypost.com/2025/11/08/us-news/nancy-pelosi-made-130-...
It's one thing to use insider information, it's another to be blatant and unapologetic.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_congressional_insider_tra...
I guess the best thing you can do, individually, is watch Nancy Pelosi on unusual whales and make the same moves.
Whatever she's investing in, he chases the money.
By having lawmakers as peers, you’d have a natural feel for what laws have momentum, who would benefit, etc.
I’m not ruling out corruption, just that assuming malicious intent often masks underlying dynamics.
It’s not insider information to buy or short a stock knowing you’re about to do something that will impact a company.
I think if you asked average USA citizens, the majority would support more restrictions, or an outright ban on trading, for the legislature. But our country isn't even pretend-run according to the will of the people at this point. The veneer of listening to the people is practically completely gone.
I remember writing to one of my reps about a decade ago, urging that she vote a particular way on an issue. The canned auto-reply that I got in response told me why she was right to take the opposite stance and didn't even pretend to value my feedback. It used to be part of the job that a politician would lie to you and say they valued your opinion, even if we all knew that was bs. It was a real mask-off moment that I didn't realize was about to become the norm throughout our country.
Don't these people get a salary already? If "serving the people" isn't enough as an incentive, maybe they shouldn't be in a position for serving the people?
Outlaw politicians owning stocks at all, it makes no sense they ever could in the first place, when the incentives are so obviously misaligned. It simply lives too much room for misbehaving actors, no matter how much bandage you put on top.
Running an election campaign as anyone but a filthy rich person means you have to accept a brown bag at the beginning with a lot of implied conditions. Sortition means it's at least possible you get someone who isn't looking for the brown bag.
I mean sure, but sortition has tons of it's own problems, and it's actually pretty easy to reduce the requirement to take a bag before you can run a campaign, because this is something every other democratic country manages.
The US is the only country that allows you to run campaign adverts years ahead of time. That's expensive. The US has no limits to campaign contributions in the first place, and no ceiling on campaign spending. The US has loudly declared that it is right and just that the mega rich oil Baron can pay for literally every single campaign if they want, and unilaterally control who has access to his funds for getting elected. The US Supreme court has declared that it is a good thing that the oil baron can always outspend average people to get their needs heard.
Maybe fix the part of our country where we allowed the supreme court to insist that more money should give you more access and control over government. Maybe fix the part where half the country insists that we should elect "Businessmen" who will run a country like a "Business" because that's somehow a good thing, and that having someone who has direct business interests that are contrary to the interest of the general public run said government is a good way to do things.
It's like thinking that Pharma adverts are bad and so we should destroy the pharma industry. Like, no, chill, just ban pharma adverts like the rest of the world.
The bigger risk with sortition is that power isn't granted through a title, but through people agreeing to respect that title. If the authority of that title ends up being undermined, then it's entirely possible for power to shift from our representatives to other, probably more entrenched, groups. One could argue that on many issues this is already the case. For instance Congress ostensibly has oversight over the intelligence agencies but the power relationship there is completely reversed. For those that don't know, Congressmen don't have classified access by default. Millions of people in the US have classified clearance, but the people representing the country at the highest level - nah, why would they need such a thing?
Less sure on senators.
But on the whole I agree with term limits for Congress.
The problem is getting the house full of lifers to agree to the real swamp of government (it’s Congress).
I'm only half kidding - yes, there are outliers, many of whom probably should have retired years ago (but not because they've been around too long, but because they're simply too old to do the job - Pelosi and McConnell come to mind). But, the range of term limits that are usually discussed are already within the existing range, so it doesn't change all that much.
I doubt a minority/majority leader with only 2 terms would be as good at snaking in this kind of stuff in, or snaking their way through the politics of various committees to kill off proposed legislation before it's voted upon, that takes practice to really get good at all the underhanded techniques.
I'd absolutely support a maximum age limit, maybe e.g. if you will reach 70 years of age in your term of office you cannot run. So a senator could be elected up to age 64. A Representative up to age 68. And I'd apply that to all elected offices. My biggest criticism of Biden vs. Trump was that they were both too old.
We want the stability of someone who has seen life’s ups and downs and understands there is more to life than the petty day to days of a presidency. There is a legacy beyond them and they imbue that in their policy.
Age can be a symptom of your inability to do this, but it is not the problem.
The problem is with specific mental ailments and behavior coming into the presidency. We should scrutinize those ailments heavily, and build a culture around stepping down when life inevitably gets to you too — and having it taken from you if you do not take the opportunity for mutual dignity.
The problems that afflicted Biden could happen to anyone at any age. It is a problem if any candidate experiences it.
And I do not really think age has effectively changed Trump’s view of the world.
Also, where are you getting these numbers?
How realistic is this though? Getting elected to Congress usually means having some other prior government experience, or your opponents attack you with "why would you give this person responsibility at a congressional level if they've never even worked in local politics?" Not to mention you need name recognition, a history in government that people can use to understand your values as acted, relationships in government to accomplish anything.
As I get older it seems that liberal democracy basically requires career bureaucrats to function. I'm very open to discussing other ways of organizing society, but if we're gonna do liberal democracy, seems this is the way.
I would contend there are plenty of people in lower levels who can move up or not. Was the mayor of the next town over any good and thus I want to send them onto state congress? Was a library board member two towns over good and I want them in the US house? For that matter, do they run a good honest business (there are lots of businesses) that I can check out locally and thus I want to risk them.
The real key is that term limits need to apply to everyone and so nobody will bother asking about experience as there isn't anything more on their side to fall back on.
Though in the end you are probably right - doesn't mean I like it.
> As I get older it seems that liberal democracy basically requires career bureaucrats to function.
I agree, but the people in congress should not be the career bureaucrats.
It's always funny to me how much people hand wring over politicians and then they somehow believe that putting someone who currently and actively has large personal interests and incentives to make government worse for people for their own gain is somehow a good thing
If you think politicians doing things to affect their bottom line through stocks is bad, surely you recognize how crystal clear and more direct the incentive is to do that kind of thing when your "asset" is your own business that can't be easily pivoted and depends on labor being cheap and desperate?
Nevermind that those kind of people just usually have radically different worldviews about what a government SHOULD do, and that worldview almost never allows for government preventing them from harming people for profit
Even to the extent it isn't true, a plumber followed by a chef followed by ... ensures that whatever they try to do that benefits themselves is checked soon enough by the next person.
Career politicians with most power who reach the top will always be good primarily at one thing - bullshitting their way to the top in various sociopathic manners that no power structure anywhere is immune to. Those who are inside the circus for 30+ years? Expect them to be rotten to the core while wearing very polished masks, seeing and dealing with the worst and staying on top. Not a place for a nice good hearted well intending folks.
Don't expect some common good to come out of them just because it would be nice or proper thing to do, either its by mistake as a byproduct of some other effort or some pre-election campaign.
Also, let's take a step back:
> where does the power accumulated by long-term congressmen go
We need to take a very hard look at any supposedly democratic system in which power is "accumulated" by individuals. Deeply entrenched politicians who never face term limits nor reelection resistance have no reason whatsoever to care about the will of the people.
Ding ding! I think that's the real problem. If I were king for a day, I'd end gerrymandering and replace it with non-partisan (probably algorithmic) districting. And I'd shit-can partisan primaries and introduce approval voting or instant-runoff (or something similar).
Make an argument that actually supports this rather than asserting it.
Most people who study this kind of thing outright disagree.
Lobbying in the US doesn't happen because we let people work in government for a long time, plenty of other countries do that, it happens because we are one of the only places that legally empower rich people to pay for the campaigns of elected officials and have one of the most expensive political campaigning systems in the world and we openly claim lobbying to be a right of rich people.
Political parties in the US yet again come back to just how absurdly expensive running a campaign is in the US, largely because we refuse to regulate it. Other countries don't allow candidates to run advertisements a full year in advance because that's wasteful and stupid. Candidates are beholden to the political parties for campaign funding. Even Bernie suckles the political party teat to maintain his seat.
If you don't fix that but you limit the ability of a politician to gain mindshare simply by doing a good job in congress (because you only give them two terms) all you have done is make it easier for rich people to control who can get elected.
Indeed, even the US system used to be better! The Civil Rights Act was bipartisan, with meaningful republican support, because there used to be socially progressive republicans! There used to be racist asshole democrats! When the Clinton government was cutting programs, prominent republican representatives from Texas were actively working with prominent Democrat representatives to maintain funding to the particle collider project there. But as America continued to enshrine the right of the rich to fund politicians, and continued to let campaign costs balloon to the point that only a rich person's super PAC or the literal party establishments could afford to run one, what did you expect to happen?
Trumps power over the republican party is fascinating because it largely isn't money based. He's just so populist among republican voters that he can unilaterally control who gets elected regardless of funding. This is generally a fucking bad thing, because trump sucks, but it's just a more direct version of what the Democrat and Republican parties have done for a few decades now.
Are you aware that both democrat and republican lawmakers spend most of their time on the phone calling and begging rich people to fund their next election campaign, even right after an election?
None of this goes away with term limits. All you are doing is giving the people who hold the purse more power over elections.
How good would you be at your job if you had to spend a few million dollars every four years to keep it? How good would you be if your company's competitors were loudly offering to pay that burden?
Guaranteeing they never get good at their job, and institutional knowledge keeps decaying.
We need to stop pretending that Congress or any of these elected positions don't require skills. I think to be a Congressperson you have to go to specific trade school--let's call it Congress U--graduate with high honors, serve in some other government capacity, and your grades are public record. Only then are you qualified to even run for election.
Democracy isn't about letting any random firebrand run things. Heck, we don't even let random firebrands install electricity.
If there's one qualification test I would possibly support it would to pass a high school AP US History exam.
I don't know if you've been paying much attention to US politics since the year 2000 but the vast majority of them are no good at their job regardless of how long they've been there.
> We need to stop pretending that Congress or any of these elected positions don't require skills.
I don't think anyone does? But currently the only real skills you need for attaining high US office are 1) be rich and/or have enough rich people in your phone book or 2) the ability to make Donald Trump feel like a special boy.
> Democracy isn't about letting any random firebrand run things.
waves in US/UK/Argentina/Brazilian politics over the last decade
It's uh, king for a day, with checks and balances on human cruelty via chaotic caprice. How likely is that world to be worse than ours? If so, how much worse? If not here and now, then which counterfactual geography or year would you have to transported to so that this randomized process is definitely preferable?
History has shown everything we have tried ends up worse than what we have, but that doesn't mean there are not things that could be better. Only that we need to be really careful not to make things worse in a way we can't get out of in our attempt.
For another datum consider presidents' second term. This is often where they are supposed to be able to really act out their vision for the future since they're ostensibly out of politics after this and have at least 4 years of experience at the highest level, yet they almost invariably tend to be extremely underwhelming.
I'm not arguing there is no skill, but I am arguing that just spending a lot of time in office doesn't seem to correlate much with achieving that skill.
It probably, on net, increases the power of elites and decreases the power of ordinary people, which increases the already extreme tilt in that direction. Like with a lot of things, it depends on the virtue of the elites in question whether this is a great idea or a catastrophic and oppressive one. As we can see, our current elites are so shameless they blatantly trade on privileged knowledge and can’t even manage to pass a budget for the country.
This can work. We do accept accreditation for lots of aspects of the economy, and though none of them is a perfect system, does for the most part keep quacks out of certain trades.
This means you want them to do a job for four years when it takes them two or three to learn how to do it.
To me, the above seems slightly complex, but well worth undertaking in order to stop this blatant and shameless corruption.
As we’ve seen with the current president, though, it’s much more difficult when they own and control whole businesses instead of just fungible securities. To be fair to the president, there isn’t really any reasonable way to get rid of his massive conflicts of interest besides having a pre-inauguration IPO for all his companies and retaining 0 shares - and his family retaining nothing too. But that’s a bigger problem that probably cant be solved.
Stocks though, it would be easy, they just don’t want to solve it.
For similar reasons, all presidents are newbies. The benefits of having one with lots of experience would be vastly outweighed by the downsides...
The counter counter argument is that you could be a career politician working your way up: two terms at city council, two as mayor, two as governor etc…and by the time someone is voted into the national stage they presumably have decades of experience.
We are not the first people to come up with this idea.
I think it is generally believed that the less time legislators serve the more power accrues to the bureaucracy and other non-elected positions.
This is also an undesirable situation. Possibly worse than the disease, so to speak.
I really think the best and maybe only way to avoid this wealth building nonsense are much harsher term limits — public service should be severely limited to prevent people from being in decades long positions to abuse it. Term limits also prevent the incessant campaign fundraising to some extent, because say you're limited to 2 terms... there's not much point in personal fundraising on your last one
BUT in exchange, you, your immediate family, and any business, LLC, or other similar vehicle you are a named party to as a consultant, beneficiary, owner, or investor must divest of specific investments and can only hold the equivalent value of an index fund that tracks the general market. Or, you can remove yourself from the investment/ownership vehicle during the term you serve as a congressperson.
Problem solved? Probably not, but it's an interesting thought experiment. I'm sure there are a bunch of loopholes I haven't fully through through, too.
The problem with "blind trusts" is that even blind men wink and nudge. It's quite hard to police a veritable horde of Congressmen who pinky-swear to never pass information along to friends, relatives and various other associates, employed by them or otherwise.
And I know that the next stone to be cast is "yeah, but if they help friends/business associates beat the market, congresspeople can still benefit with board seats and jobs when they're done with congressional terms". That's totally valid, and I have no idea how to combat that.
They should only be allowed to invest in a fund that is open to public participation. This should also be public information. You should be able to pick a congresperson and invest in the exact same funds that they do.
1 - $174,000 is the current salary. With that, they have to maintain two households (one in DC, one in home district/state). That salary is far from unusual for white collar workers in major metro areas.
That should take the edge off any money seeking schemes. It's hard to bribe the wealthy!
For 435 congress people and 100 senators, that adds up to $5.35B, which is about 6 hours of federal spending.
They probably do more than just pay a lot though.
Congress should be paid minimum wage. They are the ones who determined that this is enough to live on so everything above that is wasteful spending of public funds. If they don't think it's enough, they can change the minimum wage to a liveable amount.
Singapore pays its public officials high salaries primarily to ensure the integrity and quality of its government. The official justification centers on attracting top talent who could otherwise command high incomes in the private sector, thereby establishing a "clean wage" that reduces the financial incentive for corruption. Salaries are explicitly benchmarked to the median income of the nation's highest earners.
e.g.,
Singapore PM annual salary: ~$1.63 million USD
Singapore President salary: ~$1.14 million USD
(These are the highest public salaries in the world for politicians)
There's no good reason to stop anyone from owning stocks. It's part of any sensible person's retirement strategy. The issue is whether there's a conflict of interest there, and blind trusts or broad market ETFs are two good ways of addressing that issue.
Other alternatives include announcing their intention to trade in specific stocks several months in advance of doing so, so that even if they know about specific long-term future advantages a company might have, it's public knowledge and others can also trade in a similar way. But the easiest solutions by far are blind trusts and broad market ETFs.
Congrescritters already have a retirement strategy provided to them for free courtesy of the American people: a pension.
On top of that, many of them never retire, they just hold power and keep collecting paychecks until the day they die.
I get the sentiment that they shouldn't be in it for the money. But money is important even for idealists. Let's say someone wants to serve the people, but not enough to take a $174,000/year salary with a lot of travel and needing to pay for lodging in a remote city, when they could be making $500,000/year at Facebook instead. Would you say that this person doesn't want to serve the people enough, and shouldn't run?
Maybe you would, but the problem is that you mostly won't get people who want to serve even more. By paying a relatively low salary, you'll end up getting:
1. Idealists with poor prospects in the job market.
2. Extreme idealists with good job prospects.
3. People who think they can leverage the position to make enough money to offset the difference in pay.
4. People rich enough not to care about piddling W-2 income.
In practice, categories 3 and 4 will win. According to https://www.quiverquant.com/congress-live-net-worth/, 107 members, or 20%, of Congress has a net worth of over $10 million. That net worth is in the top 2% of their age group. 16 members, or 3%, have a net worth of over $100 million.
And of course people don't tend to attain substantial net worth without having an eye for ways to make money, so it's very likely that those people will abuse their position to make money as long as they think they can get away with it.
I'd rather see a substantially increased salary, something like $1 million/year, so that ordinary people with decent skills can see serving in Congress as something they don't have to sacrifice for, financially. That would create a lot more competition for those positions and push out some of the extremely wealthy ones.
Who's talking about a second living space? They can move like most Americans do for work when the commute is too much.
> Let's say someone wants to serve the people, but not enough to take a $174,000/year salary with a lot of travel and needing to pay for lodging in a remote city, when they could be making $500,000/year at Facebook instead.
Then they can go work for Facebook. Who cares what they would like to have.
> Would you say that this person doesn't want to serve the people enough, and shouldn't run?
Yes.
> Maybe you would, but the problem is that you mostly won't get people who want to serve even more.
Source?
> In practice, categories 3 and 4 will win. According to https://www.quiverquant.com/congress-live-net-worth/, 107 members, or 20%, of Congress has a net worth of over $10 million. That net worth is in the top 2% of their age group. 16 members, or 3%, have a net worth of over $100 million.
Before or after they started their career?
> I'd rather see a substantially increased salary, something like $1 million/year, so that ordinary people with decent skills can see serving in Congress as something they don't have to sacrifice for, financially.
Ordinary people don't have the expectation of needing to be payed $1M to serve their country.
> That would create a lot more competition for those positions and push out some of the extremely wealthy ones.
The wealthy ones just use their wealth to get ahead.
> Before or after they started their career?
Does it matter? You don't get that kind of wealth from $174,000/year. Either you came into the job with it and thus are in category 4, or you didn't and you managed to build that wealth despite not having a salary that would produce it, meaning you're in category 3.
I don't understand how you envision moving for the job would work. You think a member of Congress from, say, Oregon should live full-time in DC? That certainly doesn't sound like a "serve the people" situation, that sounds like a "completely insulated from your constituents and always surrounded by insiders" situation. In practice, representatives are only in DC about half the year, and the part where they're not in DC is an essential part of the job.
But your link doesn't answer your statement which was that you wouldn't find people more willing to serve if you were to lower the salary.
Your link lists congressional representatives net worths which is a biased dataset which only looks at the type of people that currently run for Congress but also the money they managed to accumulate in sometimes illegal ways during their tenure (in Congress or other political appointments).
> Does it matter? You don't get that kind of wealth from $174,000/year. Either you came into the job with it and thus are in category 4, or you didn't and you managed to build that wealth despite not having a salary that would produce it, meaning you're in category 3.
Or you made that money through insider trading which is the topic at hand.
> I don't understand how you envision moving for the job would work.
You sell your house or rent it out and then you buy a train / plane ticket.
> You think a member of Congress from, say, Oregon should live full-time in DC?
Sure, that's where the votes take place.
Congress representatives have reimbursements of up to $367 per day which is enough for them to pay for travel, lodging and food costs while back in their state.
> That certainly doesn't sound like a "serve the people" situation
This is already the case right now: https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2020/05/house-candid...
> that sounds like a "completely insulated from your constituents and always surrounded by insiders" situation
Well you do have to be elected first so that means you still need to be known and liked in that district.
Their job is not only in DC though.
They have significant responsibilities in two locations, which could be a 16-hour plane ride away from each other. It would be more expensive in many locations to get temporary housing for the months when their responsibilities were in their constituencies.
The back-and-forth would be extra burdensome for families (kids in school, partner with job, etc).
Also, House terms are only two years. They'd need to be prepared to disrupt their families' lives on ~60-days notice, every two years.
My understanding is that many Representatives, especially, keep their house at home, and rent in DC (often with other Reps as roommates).
None of this is insurmountable or particularly egregious. Many of us have had to do worse! But it selects against people with ordinary adult-responsibility lives, which I would argue are the kinds of people we want to select for as representation.
> Or you made that money through insider trading which is the topic at hand.
Right, that would be the thing I mentioned where people leverage the position for money beyond the salary. I’m not sure you’re actually understanding what you’re replying to.
The point is to level the playing field, not to become so restrictive and punishing that the job only appeals to politicians who are so self-sacrificing that they don’t exist as much as people want. Stocks also aren’t the only place where politicians could leverage their positions for personal financial gain.
I think the simplest way forward would be to require immediate, not delayed, disclosure of trades. If they’re doing something, let everyone see it immediately and it specific detail.
We could also implement some planned trading requirements for large purchases of individual stocks: If someone wants to trade more than $100K of something, make them announce it 7 or even 1 day in advance. They still get to buy it, but the market can front-run the investment if they believe there’s inside info at play.
If Congress is acting on singular companies, the congress people are usually smart enough to avoid obviously trading that singular stock.
The abstract doesn't seem to agree. The use of "firms" and "corporate" implies individual companies.
"purchase of stocks whose firms receiving more government contracts and favorable party support on bills. The corporate access channel is reflected in stock trades that predict subsequent corporate news and greater returns on donor-owned or home-state firms."
Banning trading outright is impossible and won't happen.
Congressional staff and congresspeople (and their families + extended families) should be forced to trade via an exchange that publicly discloses immediately, and any person on public dime needs to disclose specifically WHY they made the trade or, there needs to be some sort of mechanism that forces said congressfolk to disclose their trades 48 hours prior to execution, and held for at least X amount of time. Any selling of security needs to be announced well ahead of time.
Running for congress is already kind of a financially silly thing to do, that ship has sailed. Let’s pull the trigger on this and just see what happens.
Evidently it's not. There's another problem that it seems to me that it's mainly wealthy elite who get in. How many working class people are there in major leadership positions?
Cards on the table: I just don’t think people operate with single incentives like that, and even if they did, it’s a cost I’d pay easily.
Congressmen's salaries need to increase by 10x.
What's wrong with that? "If you choose a life in government, you'll never be rich, but you may be powerful" seems like a perfectly acceptable situation.
We don't stop athletes who use the gym regularly from competing because all the guys using steroids also went to the gym a lot.
And you're conflating "being financially intelligent" with "being primarily motivated by profit and personal gain".
A conman is often "financially intelligent", too, but what they're inclined to do with that intelligence matters.
There's so much more to life and the world than the number on your portfolio for christs sake.
Restricting people only to government bond investments (the first line of my post, the point I was responding to) does not happen widely in industry.
Restricting people’s trades of a few stocks where they have insider knowledge does happen. I would be in favor of laws against congressional insider trading, too, but not laws forbidding all stock ownership or restricting them to government bonds as was proposed above. That’s just short sighted.
Neither the comment you replied to, nor the proposed law, suggest the limit should be solely government bonds, which is what you're arguing against in your comment, they both say government bonds OR publicly traded diverse stock funds, for example ETFs.
Maybe you still believe that's restrictive enough to be a problem, but considering many people, even the likes of Warren Buffet, consider the best investment advice to be either "just invest in ETF/funds that track the whole market" or "just invest in a mix of ETFs/funds and also some bonds", while nobody considers "just invest in government bonds" to be good advice, your argument would be a hell if a lot weaker if actually applied to what IS being proposed rather than pretending that the proposal only allows investing in government bonds.
The flip side is it also discourages anyone primarily looking to profit off it, rather than being interested in actual governance.
There are historical examples of what happens when lawmakers mandate high amounts of money creation. It doesn’t end with the people being better off. It usually destroys the economy.
[1] https://statisticalatlas.com/metro-area/District-of-Columbia...
If you’re in a situation where getting more wealth could endanger your power, it makes sense not to wealth-max since, again, what else could you buy with it? But you need to get into the “what else could you buy with it” regime for this reasoning to make sense.
Someone who only has basic needs gets there pretty early. But even the relatively unenlightened don’t need the second jet except, yannow, for power.
So it's better to encourage people without any morals?
I think we need politicians who have the financial sense to see that the government is built to serve people whether or not they're invested in the market. As it is now now we've completely failed the American people.
You're talking about HR 5106 [0] (aka the "Restore Trust in Congress Act"), currently being blocked by Republican House leadership, and actively facing a discharge position by the House rank and file (Republican included) to force a vote [1].
[0] https://www.congress.gov/119/bills/hr5106/BILLS-119hr5106ih....
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/congress-stock-trading-ban-disc...
I don't know where the Overton Window is today, but it's a long way from Jimmy Carter's peanut farm.
Ironically, somewhere I was walking around on Sunday. Pretty place.
Source: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/119/hr5106
It also blocks stock trading entirely for congressmen, which is dramatically different from what gp was suggesting.
The bill is sponsored by 37% of Democrats
22 Republican cosponsors out of 219 Republican representativs.
The bill is sponsored by 10% of Republicans.
I think you might be jumping to conclusions by calling it a bipartisan flop. Co-sponsorship is not the same as a vote, there may be people not on the sponsorship list who would vote for the bill.
The bill was introduced 3 months ago (43 days these last three months was a government shutdown) and not enough time has passed to determine whether the bill will be a "flop" or not.
I'm certainly not trying to seem like I'm jumping to any conclusions. But we should like to keep our definitions uniform throughout a given paragraph. Well, at least if we aspire to call ourselves rational.
Even "ETFs" are a big enough hole to drive a truck through in terms of performance, e.g., it's not hard to guess how an oil ETF will perform in response to certain geopolitical events.
We could also apply Presidential rules to all of them. The President has to essentially forgo all ability to manage his or her wealth during the time they are in office. Such shenanigans as they play must either be to benefit someone else, or a very long term play for when they are out of office. This is still what you might call "suboptimal" but it's an improvement, even just the "longterm" part. (We should be so lucky as for our politicians to be thinking about how to goose the longterm performance of our economy rather than how to make a couple million next week no matter what it does to everyone else.)
I think having a congressional required fund that the public could also invest in makes sense as well.
I’ve been thinking about an act to intentionally enrich members of Congress for reducing the deficit (e.g. a fraction of percent of savings certified by GAO goes to district and to member’s fund with a multi year cool off period, saving based on ratcheted down watermark).
The first allows constituents to reap the benefits of their member’s power, the second incentivizes members to be as financially motivated to not spend money as they are to spend money.
There needs to be more incentive to be wise with that money though. If a representative decides to “fall on their sword” and cut spending on local infrastructure projects, they enrich themselves while impoverishing their constituents. Other reps probably won’t jump in to save a district they don’t represent. I would worry that this would make politicians fleecing their neighbors even worse.
1. Only things that approximately match the contents of TSP funds or broader
2. Have to write down a 10b5-1 for the entire duration of your election plus one year, with a double cooloff period (6mo vs 3mo), and have to extend it within 3mo of each successful election.
The situation right now isn't just corrupting, congress-critters are labeled as idiots by their own if they don't actively take advantage of "perks" like free stock tips that would be illegal in any other context.
The "everyone does it" excuse is what keeps this house of cards up. And it is not partisan, both D's and R's inevitably become rich if they stay in the house for more than a couple of terms.
Fundamentally you can classify modern society into two groups: government and commercial citizenry.
The incentives of these two groups are misaligned and that is essentially the origin of all corruption.
The commercial citizen, his goal is to make money, compete and to do so by bending the rules and using any means possible.
The government, his goal is to be fair, to enforce and follow the rules, and to guard citizens.
When you combine these two groups the incentives collide. You get government officials who are supposed to be fair but instead they are incentivized by commercial interests so they make biased laws, take bribes and do all that shit.
To reduce corruption you really need to create societies made up of two different groups with two different sets of incentives.
Dictators are more immune to this effect because all of their commercial incentives are pretty much completely fulfilled as they own the whole country.
In a democracy the closest sort of thing I’ve seen to this is priesthood. Buddhism or becoming a monk is similar but these are not elevated leadership positions like priests.
Basically when you become a government official it should be like becoming a priest. You are removing yourself from commercial society. It changes everything. Your incentives are different and it even filters out all the bad actors.
Such a society can realistically exist. I think the unrealistic part is converting our current society into something like this.
The second potential issue is one of pay - the best of society can make far more in a commercial setting than in a government setting - barring corruption, of course.
These people who become priests do so for other reasons and they largely want to exit the commercial economy. That’s the type of people government should be made of. Under this system pretty much 100 percent of politicians wouldn’t have even become a politician.
https://www.allpastors.com/top-20-richest-pastors-in-america...
Yes, priesthood is perhaps not a traditional path toward achieving $100M+ net worth. Yet people have gotten there that way…
has it been shown that a salary would actually remove the incentives for corruption? maybe for some but greed is a strong incentive.
Sure, forbid them from making investments. What about “consulting” work? What about private company ownership?
What about their spouse? Are they also forbidden from all activities? Family members? In-laws?
I feel like there are too many ways of self-dealing that would be hard to prevent.
It should be a social stimga that voters care deeply about. But voters would have to first care to vote…
I don't have a great solution for the 2nd issue you pose though. Raising the pay of elected officials is often politically unpopular, but you're certainly right that one makes more in the private sector than as a junior congressperson.
So they aren’t really immune to sector changes (like a bill banning AI would crash it very heavily).
I'd go one step further: upon election you have to convert all equity assets to US bonds.
This conception of "citizen" is even more depressing to me than Homo Economicus. There are values aside from wealth, and not everyone is a money grubbing sociopath.
Conversely, if you somehow solve that, it brings forth a new problem: the "govenrment citizens" are now an alien society, with little understanding of lives of people they serve. To borrow your priest analogy, it's like Catholic priests giving marital advice to couples - it tends to be wildly off mark, as celibacy gives the priest neither experience nor stake in happy marriages.
My concern would be that the "skill" we're seeing isn't with using insider information, but with using their power to alter outcomes to make whatever investments they'd previously chosen become profitable post hoc. If they're causing our regulatory landscape to be change to pad their wallets, that's going to have a much greater effect on our overall system than just being able to make a trade a day earlier than the rest of us.
I am. I work at a company that trades publicly. My wife works at a firm. I can’t do anything with my stocks outside of three weeks a quarter. I can never buy options. My wife has to clear her positions with whatever department. If I have these obstacles, congress should absolutely have them — maybe more. Ideally they can trade index funds and that’s about it.
This jealousy is a minor issue, though. There's no reason for you to believe Congresspeople should have exactly the same limitations and opportunities that you have. This is in fact a discussion that involves limiting them from doing things that you would retain the right to do.
The problem is how they govern.
For me, if I can improve the lot of everyone by at least X%, but doing so means that some few people will actually get a benefit of 2X%, that's a darn good deal. Withholding the potential X% from those poor people just because it's not fair seems rather cruel. We may have the luxury of wanting things to be fair, but there are some people for whom those X% will make all the difference.
By that logic why have equality for anything? Why even have civil rights if you can just be like “that’s just the way it is, why should you be able to vote? I’ll vote for the best of all our interests”. It doesn’t work that way.
> For me, if I can improve the lot of everyone by at least X%, but doing so means that some few people will actually get a benefit of 2X%, that's a darn good deal.
In an altruistic society, maybe. But economic theory is based on the idea that everyone will try to do what’s best for them and not for the masses. Congress sets the laws - so they are more interested in benefiting themselves than anyone else. Therefore we need a forcing function, and one way would be to clamp down on insider trading.
They should be more accountable, not less.
Well, that's the problem, right there. We shouldn't be thinking about making new laws that they also won't subject themselves to. We should be thinking about shoring up the rule of law, and ensuring that they are always held accountable.
Unfortunately, today's partisan politics prevents that from happening. The partisans - on BOTH sides - behave as if it's more important that their own side appear faultless and all guilt falls on their opponent. So partisans ensure that those on their own side will get a free pass.
It's not the effect on the market you should be worried about. It's the effect on democracy. If you have a culture of people comfortable with doing very well thank you off the back of the broad knowledge they have access to that is not-quite-non-public-but-buried-in-the-minutes, then you are tolerating the first tier of the rot.
The second tier of the rot is insider trading.
The third tier is the insider trading that is happening when nobody cares, like in the current regime.
The third tier of the rot is the grift. You can see the grift happening now.
You have to go broken-windows-policy on this or you have nothing.
The SEC enforcement of Insider Trading laws is also simultaneously both ineffective and created high-profile wrong cases which get people with influence to further weaken it.
Seems to me the best solution to all of the above is to simply require ALL trades to be open and transparent with the ultimate beneficial owner and the trade available in real-time. Pharma scientists & execs start buying/selling their stock unusually? Easy to setup trackers so we know it in the same second and can also take advantage of their knowledge that their new drug trial succeeded/failed, and it will eliminate much of the insider-trading edge. A congressperson buys/sells a bundle of shares of a company in his state? Again, we see they're likely getting/losing contracts soon, and again, much of the margin disappears.
Traders would rapidly setup hedge funds and ETFs to ensure this happens in milliseconds, and much of the advantage and problems of insider trading being unfair disappear, along with a lot of enforcement cost.
Obviously just a concept, what are the holes?
You are trying to stop people from using knowledge for gain... In a system that is fundamentally designed to reward using knowledge for gain. Fully enforcing insider trading law requires slicing of categories and resolution of ambiguity that creates the same problems it does in the other knowledge market law: decisions that feel unfair even if the letter says they aren't, people getting away with things that feel wrong on a technicality, and the whole category Congress people fall into where it's impossible to do their job and not obtain enough market knowledge to be leverageable.
I don't have enough historical knowledge to know if this was always a problem and we just weren't sensitive to it or if past generations were more modest or magnanimous and either didn't take advantage of what they knew or took advantage of it and spread the wealth around, but I think we might be trying to fundamentally solve the wrong problem.
It is entirely possible that the problem is the asymmetry is the market creates themselves. There may simply be no better, more efficient solution than taxing the hell out of the rich, no matter how they got there.
It's even more damning than that I think.
>we find that lawmakers who later ascend to leadership positions perform similarly to matched peers beforehand but outperform them by 47 percentage points annually after ascension.
The same person makes more after being put in a leadership position than before. That essentially removes any possibility of 'well maybe they're just more knowledgable and that's why they're in leadership.'
A person typically picks stocks based on some view of the future: what’s going to be valuable, how the world is going to change, etc. Presumably, a congressperson does the same when drafting legislation - try to move the world in the direction they think it should go. The underlying worldview and outlook is the shared variable, and congresspeople in leadership positions are more capable of moving the world the way they think it should go than anyone else. The increased stock performance is because someone in congressional leadership’s predictions for the future are more self-fulfilling than most.
(Again, that’s the best steel man I can offer, and if you made it this far without laughing, I commend you)
Based on the dollar amounts, no. What makes it noteworthy is it’s a massive corruption scandal.
People who make/have more money also have more appetite for risk and also in general make more returns. Even without insider trading, being able to take a lopsided position on tech with the expectation that if it loses you still have a comfortable life, that is how the rich become richer.
You are basically comparing the CEO to middle layer management, and then what do you expect? You need to do a more balanced comparison than that to show an actual discrepancy. Or maybe get congress to dole leadership positions out at random and then compare?
- It’s not just representatives but their staff, family and friends. See the Covid scandals as an example.
- Often the information they’re privy to can come from their networks outside of government. The current transparency laws give us insights into their family members’ investments which is incredibly beneficial public knowledge.
- The current laws have no teeth and are not enforced well. Immediate disclosure should be required & automated for elected representatives, judges, family & staff within 24 hours. Late reporting should be immediate sale and loss of any profits.
1. Sometimes that the project is happening before everyone else 2. If the project will or will not be approved or stopped e.g. in committee 3. Various other classified things like Dept of Defense briefings (if the Army says it needs XYZ component and plans to buy 10 billion worth of them, then buy the company that makes XYZ component).
Maybe I'm simply too dumb to interpret this paper, but overall I find it unconvincing of anything notable or scandalous.
At this point, there's a whole body of evidence
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10590...
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/cong...
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2501822122
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
https://campaignlegal.org/sites/default/files/2022-02/Congre...
The Unusual Whales piece says that in 2023, Democrats had 31% returns, Republicans 18%, and SPY was 25%. Doing a weighted calculation, I get (31212+18222)/(212+222) = 25% exactly. So that piece provides some strong evidence that in that year, Congress did not outperform the market, despite attempting to imply the opposite.
Your other links are just general speculation on the subject, and in fact link 4 even says "House and Senator stock returns are consistent with random stock picking."
I do think Congress should probably be restricted from options and maybe short-term trading in general. But I get frustrated by all these doomers who think Congress is corrupt and doing insider trading all the time when there's just not any generalized evidence for it.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26975/w269...
Both papers could be true if congresspeople are worse than the public at picking stocks, but congressional leaders are just better than the average congressperson
It could be possible that someone in Congress has insider information about a specific industry that helps them, but not about a specific stock. For example, if I knew about specific legislation that would impact auto manufacturers I may have a better idea to get in or out of that sector without necessarily knowing if Ford will do better than GM.
To your point about meta-analysis it would also be useful to know if members are worse than normies at picking industries as well.
Real-estate investing is another corruption vector. One way to bribe a politician is to sell them a house at a million dollar discount. The optics become that the politician is a “savvy real-estate investor".
Ticker: NANC, its an ETF
So we're looking at 11% - 3.5% = 7.5% real return over 5 years, or roughly 1.5% per year. I'll easily recommend passing on this one.
Where do I get some of this "riskless" VOO? My broker only seems willing to sell me the regular, risky kind.
And everyone ignores the fact that her husband is a professional in the finance and venture capital world. Investing is literally his job.
Anyway, if you want to track her trades there are ETFs to do it. It’s not an exclusive investment thing. If you’re in the US you could buy them from your broker right now.
There are also countless sites that will push the Nancy Pelosi portfolio to your inbox, but they’re universally spammy and almost always pushing some other agenda too.
As a rule: If they’re focused specifically on Nancy Pelosi and not looking at top congressional trades as a whole, they’re more interested in pushing a political content than financial content.
Oh, and it’s important to know that you can’t actually track congressional portfolios in real time. The disclosures are delayed so you can only track them after the fact. If you believe they’re front-running insider info then the changes may have happened before you could possibly get the signal to buy or sell.
One smacks of hypocrisy while the other is a dirt bag behaving exactly as expected.
Given the situation (that it's unfortunately legal for them to do this) I don't blame either one for taking money left on the table. Why forgo a financial windfall, who benefits by that? The voters should back candidates who will change the law, and then we can talk about criminality and not selective hypocrisy outrage.
https://www.quiverquant.com/congresstrading/politician/Marjo...
https://www.quiverquant.com/congresstrading/politician/Nancy...
Sure doesn't look like it.
It looks like she buys and holds, unlikely nancy. And it looks like she bought some AMD which had great returns (oh how I wish I bought it) and held it.
Looks like a false claim to me.