Comment by alexpotato | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexpotato | Hacker News Reader

One of my favorite recently learned facts about Congress:

Federally mandated parental leave (paternity and maternity leave) polls at about 80% in favor with the US adult population. This is regardless of political affiliation, by the way. Democrat and Republican voters both support it.

Upon reading this, you might be surprised as to why it's NOT federally mandated given how popular it is.

One group it's NOT popular with is corporations. And corporations donate a lot of money to politicians. And it's cheaper to donate to politicians who are against parental leave than it is to pay people for that parental leave.

I enjoy sharing this b/c it's a reminder that there are groups who spend a lot of time and money to get their way. At first, that might feel overwhelming. You might be surprised to know that when you call your local congressperson, those calls gets tallied b/c they want to know what their constituents care about. So give them a call and let them know.

This has been studied, famously by Princeton [1]. The chance of any given bill passing is roughly 30% and any amount of public support from 0% to 100% has almost zero impact on that 30%.

Elected offices have become fiefdoms to enrich oneself and maintain the status quo. Anyone who bucks this trend has historically rarely gotten into office or been chased out once they do. This could be from funding another candidate, simply starving an existing candidate of campaign funds or in some cases by redistricting somebody out of a seat.

And look at the reelection rates for Congress [2]. They tend to hover between 90% and 95%.

[1]: https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba

[2]: https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/reelection-ra...

One of the things I have found so alarming about a lot of recent revelations is just how cheap congress goes for.

I believe $50-100k

Absolutely not.

You're off by 10.

> One of the things I have found so alarming about a lot of recent revelations is just how cheap congress goes for.

The executive branch is also available for relatively bargain basement prices!

Ask us about our unlimited pardoning power for federal offenses!

#Ad #WorldLibertyFinancial

Watch out though because many of those revelations are bogus and only look at how much money people lobbying for a position donated to some member of Congress who voted for that position. They fail to look up how much money people lobbying against that position donated to that same member of Congress.

Often times it is about the same amount, which means you cannot infer that the money influenced the vote.

Some do it right, but enough do not that unless you know you are getting the information from one of the ones who does it right you really need to check for yourself.

I only-kinda-jokingly say that I'd be willing to be the sacrifice and get a second mortgage on my house if it could buy the entire nation some new rights.

Our politicians routinely sell out smaller issues for "downpayment in a coastal metro" level of money. It's just about within reach of a middle-class urban adult to directly fund with some personal sacrifices.

I feel like we like to imagine that these corporations are budgeting big-bucks to bribe/lobby politicians, because they have more money than most humans can actually mentally picture, but their budgets are often closer to a small team of software engineers' salary. Meta spend ~$25M on all lobbying last year - and they're the top corporate spender. That's under 1 hours of revenue for them.

> could buy the entire nation some new rights

It's important to remember that rights cannot be received, or bought. Privileges can. Equally easily privileges can be taken away again.

But rights can only be won in a fight.

Sadly, they also require a constant readiness to fight for keeping them; in civilized societies this happens in courtrooms, but escalations to the worse happen periodically.

Always wondered about this…

Are politicians really so beholden to an anonymous donor that makes a single $50k donation? Or even a single $500k one?

Or is it the real knowledge that said known regular donors will continue indefinitely as long as things go their way (and indefinitely support the opposition otherwise) …?

The pessimistic part of me wonders if a grassroots campaign that raised $10M would even be able drive any change with it.

I think it is more that corps select which politician gets ahead than that they are beholden to them.

50k USD is a an awful lot of money for a lower level politician to run an election campaign with.

> Our politicians routinely sell out smaller issues for "downpayment in a coastal metro" level of money

you act like 1) ideology doesn't play in, and that 2) it's not a long-con situation; you give 60k now, but they're gonna expect 60k next election cycle.

and remember: if you can buy them now, someone else could by them with more money. see also that asshole from PA, J Fetterman

In that case, maybe it would make sense for regular people to create their own PACs. Like a privacy PAC. Pay for lobbyists who are more persuasive than our angry emails.

As they say, freedom ain’t free.

https://theonion.com/american-people-hire-high-powered-lobby...

This gets it a bit backwards, the money is a reward for playing along within the system, not a straight cash-for-policy transaction.

If you don't play along with the elite line, they throw $50 million into a primary election to get you out of power. That's where you start to get into enough money to make a political difference, and even then the money is only part of the equation.

From the responses I've gotten from my representatives when I've written them, my impression is they care a lot more about their corporate sponsors and the party line than they do about their constituents.

If we had voter referendums at the federal level, most “hot button” partisan issues would be solved because there is consensus across 70-75% of the population, even if weighted by state somehow

> Federally mandated parental leave (paternity and maternity leave) polls at about 80% in favor with the US adult population. This is regardless of political affiliation, by the way. Democrat and Republican voters both support it.

This sounds like the sort of thing where if you poll people yes/no, a majority of people support it, but then if you ask them whether they'll change their vote over it, the people who said yes say it's not their most important issue and they don't care about it enough to do anything. Whereas the people who said no are e.g. small business owners if you don't exempt them from it because they can't afford to pay someone for extended time off while simultaneously paying someone else to fill in for them, or large business owners if you do exempt the small businesses because they hate anything that gives smaller companies a relative advantage, and both of them will actually care if you try to do it and oppose the policy either way for fear that it might get changed during or after being enacted.

So then you have 80% wants x 1% cares vs. 20% wants x 75% cares and the second number ends up being bigger.

Washington’s paid parental leave act has us put money into our Unemployment Insurance program in addition to the UI payments we already make. So the business owners don’t have to pay for it, they just have to allow it to happen.

What percent of the original 80% who supported it still support it when you tell them they're the ones who will pay for it though? (They would have been either way, but that sort of thing tends to affect polling numbers.)

Well, if you think money in politics or corporations buying politicians is bad now, it is going to get exponentially worse in the USA. The Supreme Court recently gave a decision that allows the rich oligarchy to give unlimited amounts of money[1] to their favorite puppets... excuse me, politicians.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2026/06/30/nx-s1-5827039/supreme-court-c...

Free housing, free food, free health care, and free income are also wildly popular with the US adult population. The problem is that those things are not really "free" because somebody else needs to pay for them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

Better to spend money on helping our neighbors than going around the world murdering people

Does free housing help people? The state of “the projects” in every metro would say otherwise.

Does free food help people? Most Americans are already overweight, and far, far more die every year from diseases of excess consumption than hunger/malnutrition. Furthermore, when you give them food stamps, they try to sell and defraud the program to buy drugs or alcohol.

We already “help” these people to the tune of many billions of dollars a year - let’s ask they make some cultural changes before we dive even deeper into debt as a nation.

>Does free housing help people?

Studies say yes.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8513528/

Your vibes and general lack of empathy don't make you correct.

That disabled non-producers go to the ER less if given an apartment is true doesn't make it empathetic or correct to build enormous unproductive spending networks under the label of homelessness, either.

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/california-homeles...

$50,000 a year per homeless with minimal, if any, result - if it's empathy, it's suicidal empathy to emit those kinds of funds without results year after year into systems that have sprung up to capture them and ask for more.

Have you ever met anyone who's disabled and living off of SSI? We should be doing more to help them.

"Somebody else needs to pay for" warmongering, too, yet there's nowhere near as much hand-wringing about how "somebody else needs to pay for them".

You’re confusing free to the user with free to the government. Those are all great examples of things which make huge differences in the lives of the people who need them while having no meaningful impact on taxpayers (forget Jeff Bezos, none of us would significantly change our lives if we paid for childcare or housing out of general fund revenue, and that’s before you factor in how much money we’d save getting better treatment with universal healthcare — every time I’ve done the math comparing us with Denmark, it’s been roughly even once you factor in how much we pay for insurance).

Part of how you can tell it’s not the cost motivating opposition is that this concern is never applied to defense spending.

This is such a straw man argument. Consider health care.

The US spends by far the most per-capita on health care of any OECD country [1]. It's roughly 50% more than the number 2 on the list, which is Switzerland, a notoriously expensive country. Yet (almost?) every other country on that list has universal healthcare. Yet life expectancy is lower than Costa Rica [2] and generally health outcomes are worse in the US than most OECD nations.

So providing universal healthcare would actually be cheaper overall but it would destroy a health insurance companies, which are nothing more than parasitic rent-seekers. There would be less spending per capita but a lot of that spending would be made by the government rather than companies. So you'd need to tax to cover that cost, which would be significant, but it would be overall cheaper.

Now consider housing. We treat it as a speculative investment rather than something to provide shelter. There is absolutely no reason for it to be as expensive as it is. All we're doing is a massive wealth transfer from the young and poor to the old and rich. Yet we, as a society, choose to prioritize landlord and speculator profits over people, quite literally, dying in the street.

Food? We produce an abundance of food, more than we can eat. There is absolutely no reason anyone should go hungry in any OECD nation, ever. We destroy food to protect profits.

As for income, people generally want to be paid enough to live on, something that's becomign increasingly difficult. And again, we choose minting billionaires at a stupendous rate (and now trillionaires) over paying people a living wage.

[1]: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/11/health-at-a-gla...

[2]: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/11/health-at-a-gla...

The problem with attempting to provide universal healthcare in the united states is that, despite health professionals attesting to the necessity and validity of certain health related topics, the current administration in particular is very keen about stripping away access to these forms of care, as far as they legally can (medicare/medicaid, VA, federal funding).

UHC requires the removal of politicians from qualified input, and this country's politicians love nothing more than to get overly involved in things they know nothing about.

That's broken as well, yes, but that shouldn't stop us from fixing things incrementally.

> The problem is that those things are not really "free" because somebody else needs to pay for them.

This line of thinking is exactly why America is sliding backwards.

It is not a problem to pay for things provide a net benefit to society.

Exactly. Giving people free stuff is extremely popular. If people actually want those things, we can collective open our wallets and pay for it. But that changes people's opinions quite radically.

Does it? I'm skeptical. In fact, we apparently have more than enough money for it because we suddenly have billions to spend on war in the Middle East.

*hundreds to thousands of billions

"It costs money, therefore it's impossible."

You think social democrats never heard of a balanced budget? I don't know how you "fiscal conservatives" take yourselves seriously.

I mean, the republicans constantly pay for things nobody wants, so uh, what's the issue here?

The vote for “more free stuff” should only be open to the half of the population that actually pays taxes. Otherwise, the takers will inevitably vote to take more.

Yet we apparently have money for military parades and wars and ballrooms. Go figure.

There are infinity dollars in the Federal Reserve. Pay-for requirements are a concern troll bludgeon used against only politically disfavored spending. Taxation (on the federal level) does not pay for services, but merely counteracts the inflationary effect of their provision in an indirect way. It's indirect enough that those who disregard it are not politically punished.

On the healthcare front it’s not even a question. We are already paying via insurance and deductibles and copays etc. W2s don’t see most of the cost because their company pays it.

It might come as a shock to you then that running government or military or any government service requires “somebody else needs to pay for them”. Let’s get rid of those too. Long live anarchy.

Fact is people who spout this nonsense are simply selfish people with “F you, got mine” mindset. They hide their selfishness in garb and call others socialist.

I guess the rich people will have to cope with one less super-yacht this year.

You’re welcome to give all your money away first, then worry about taking others.

You a temporarily embarrassed billionaire? Paying their fair share in taxes (corporate and otherwise) is far from "taking all their money away".

if tech bro billionaires are posting anywhere it's probably HN...

but lets be real, they pay shillbots

e.g. 50% or more internet traffic is now bot: https://cpl.thalesgroup.com/about-us/newsroom/2025-imperva-b...

The top 1% alone are 40% of the federal income tax receipts.

40% of the population pays 0% in income taxes, often receiving credits and refunds.

I’m all for everyone contributing: one side looks like it’s contributing 40% already. How much more do you think should be taken from them to give to the people that currently contribute 0?

Why do you think the top 1% pays that much in tax? Because we impose arbitrary taxes on them or because they get the vast amount of the wealth as well?

What's the top income tax bracket? Does it go up to Jeff Bezos levels or does it taper off quite a far amount below that?

How much do you value a stable society that doesn't promote mass death? What percentage of the wealthiest's income should we recognize comes from a world that is stable and peaceable because of opportunities for us all?

I was parodying someone very famous who said the same thing about dolls last Christmas.

If a million people want it and it is worth $100 to them they could create a superpac for this with $100m funding?

Yes, apparently there are crowdfunded superpacs exactly for this purpose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayday_PAC

if DSA gets enough people in, that might go through?

pretty directly within the realms of what their candidates support, and they have a pretty good purity test to tell who to support or not with the genocide question

DSA?

Communists

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