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.
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?
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?
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...
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?
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.
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?
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.
CA doesnt care about this -- you continue to re-elected Pelosi, she is one of the worst violators of this