101–110 of 232 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is about the Fed banning it's own policymakers from owning them, not about congress.
Perhaps someone will start a “Speaker of the House” index fund which the officers from the Federal Reserve can buy, since they won’t be able to buy individual stocks.
The relatively low salaries compared to the huge amounts of power is almost begging for insider trading, influence peddling, etc. > The salary of a Congress member varies based on the job title of the congressman or senator. Most senators, representatives, delegates and the resident commissioner from Puerto Rico make a salary of $174,000 per year. https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/pay-salary/congressman-... Then a…
This is about the Fed banning it's own policymakers from owning them, not about congress.
I joked in the past that politicians should only be allowed to buy index funds. In their local currency and from their country of course. Basically, do a good job for the economy overall and then your net worth will increase.
* how behavior changes when elected officials are required to have their interest in line with their constituents.
* what mixes people choose.
The relatively low salaries compared to the huge amounts of power is almost begging for insider trading, influence peddling, etc. > The salary of a Congress member varies based on the job title of the congressman or senator. Most senators, representatives, delegates and the resident commissioner from Puerto Rico make a salary of $174,000 per year. https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/pay-salary/congressman-... Then a…
This is about the Fed banning it's own policymakers from owning them, not about congress.
The relatively low salaries compared to the huge amounts of power is almost begging for insider trading, influence peddling, etc. > The salary of a Congress member varies based on the job title of the congressman or senator. Most senators, representatives, delegates and the resident commissioner from Puerto Rico make a salary of $174,000 per year. https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/pay-salary/congressman-... Then a…
How many people would compromise their ethics a bit for $1,000,000? how about $10,000,000? $100,000,000?
Most everybody.
It's easy to be virtuous when there's no temptation.
The relatively low salaries compared to the huge amounts of power is almost begging for insider trading, influence peddling, etc. > The salary of a Congress member varies based on the job title of the congressman or senator. Most senators, representatives, delegates and the resident commissioner from Puerto Rico make a salary of $174,000 per year. https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/pay-salary/congressman-... Then a…
Your last sentence is really the key thesis. This isn't an argument to pay representatives (whether that be Congressional or at monetary policy orgs) more, but to have robust controls to better detect and action corruption. Greed knows no bounds (see: corrupt billionaires and Dark Triad personality traits [1]) and humans will be humans, so strong systems must be designed and implemented to defend against improper beh…
You are effectively demanding that policy makers be self sufficient, which selects for those policy makers most likely to benefit financially from policy decisions.
For the Fed, this doesn't seem enough. Their policy has a predictable effect on the whole market, so I think they should not be trading in the couple of weeks leading up to a Fed announcement.
If you become known for being uh.. "corrupt", the market will price out your gains.
The relatively low salaries compared to the huge amounts of power is almost begging for insider trading, influence peddling, etc. > The salary of a Congress member varies based on the job title of the congressman or senator. Most senators, representatives, delegates and the resident commissioner from Puerto Rico make a salary of $174,000 per year. https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/pay-salary/congressman-... Then a…
It's exactly the same argument as paying for media not to include advertisements.
What we should do is stop filtering for trash by having jobs that pay $174K require multi-million dollar application fees (i.e. a campaign.) That's exactly how you would hire for a job if you wanted to make sure that the primary purpose of having that job was personal enrichment. We talk about being saddled with college debt; we can see the results of being saddled with campaign debt.
How does that happen when your government is run by two tiny private clubs fueled by exactly that sort of personal ambition? It doesn't. Getting a handle on corruption in the US is going to take a lot more than a few tiny adjustments. Especially when the people responsible for making those adjustments would be the corrupt class we would be claiming to fix.
Expecting Congress to fix itself when Congress is composed of the people who were good at this process is bizarre. The best a centrist can do is wait for the courts to fix it.
edit: The court broke it more with Citizens United. It simply doesn't believe that self-enrichment from politics is bad in and of itself. It believes that part of democracy is that the elected person has a mandate to do what they think is best, within the rule of law, and helpfully abolishes any laws or norms that would prevent bribery.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/the-supreme-cour...