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House Democrats to propose ban on lawmaker stock trading – report

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Re: House Democrats to propose ban on lawmaker stock trading – report

#191

Post by nitwit005 »

nostromo wrote: post #51

Hear me out... few people want to run for federal office already. The pay isn't great and it's hard work. If the US was a company, there'd be no question that we'd need to pay our leadership much better to attract top talent. We pay senators $170k a year to manage our country with a $20 trillion economy. So what we end up with is activists who crave power and elites from rich families for whom $170k a year is a round…

The length of the campaign season matters more than the pay.

People aren't paid while campaigning, and the US campaign "season" has grown to ridiculous length. It's not realistic to work some other job while doing it anymore (unless that job is being a member of congress), so it has become quite expensive.

Re: House Democrats to propose ban on lawmaker stock trading – report

#192

Post by nimbius »

hayst4ck wrote: post #105

Lawrence Lessig (Harvard law professor famous for fighting for sane copyright law) does a great presentation on the root cause of Americas problems. He also ran for president in 2016. It can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJy8vTu66tE The short version is that to win primaries you need money. Money mainly comes from corporations and rich people. Taking money from corporations and rich people creates…

Trotsky explained this nearly a hundred years ago in arguing the dictatorship of the proletariat to Karl kantskys point of contention to the revolution of the working class. the Princeton study could best be summarized as scientific evidence of his conclusion

disclosure: I am a communist and find little value in capitalist reformations.

Re: House Democrats to propose ban on lawmaker stock trading – report

#193

Post by noasaservice »

throwaway_4ever wrote: post #73
nostromo wrote: post #51

Hear me out... few people want to run for federal office already. The pay isn't great and it's hard work. If the US was a company, there'd be no question that we'd need to pay our leadership much better to attract top talent. We pay senators $170k a year to manage our country with a $20 trillion economy. So what we end up with is activists who crave power and elites from rich families for whom $170k a year is a round…

How does paying a politician MORE than 3x median US pay make them less out of touch with the average American? We don't need politicians 15x out of touch with the median American's lifestyle. In NYC governor's last election, there was a question about how much the median house costs in Brooklyn, and two high level candidates gave absolutely bonkers answers like $90k and $120k, when it's actually $900k. You only want…

> You only want people as politicians because they feel it's their civic duty to serve their countrymen, not because it's a lucrative career.

And that's where sortition (vote by lottery) is probably the best system, combined with a way to vote to remove and "Redo lottery".

Whomever is elected by lottery would be provided a "unswayable" amount of money, basically buying corruption away. They would be set for their life.

A lottery of all eligible citizens would also have secondary effects of encouraging high education across the whole populace, so that when Joe or Jane Doe is selected, they do a good job for the citizens.

Re: House Democrats to propose ban on lawmaker stock trading – report

#194

Post by nextstep »

hayst4ck wrote: post #105

Lawrence Lessig (Harvard law professor famous for fighting for sane copyright law) does a great presentation on the root cause of Americas problems. He also ran for president in 2016. It can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJy8vTu66tE The short version is that to win primaries you need money. Money mainly comes from corporations and rich people. Taking money from corporations and rich people creates…

Marx saw this problem 100 years ago. Democracy under capitalism is just a mechanism for settling disputes among the ruling class.

Re: House Democrats to propose ban on lawmaker stock trading – report

#195

Post by eloff »

hayst4ck wrote: post #105

Lawrence Lessig (Harvard law professor famous for fighting for sane copyright law) does a great presentation on the root cause of Americas problems. He also ran for president in 2016. It can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJy8vTu66tE The short version is that to win primaries you need money. Money mainly comes from corporations and rich people. Taking money from corporations and rich people creates…

Wouldn't this be solved rather easily by prohibiting fund raising and using tax dollars to finance campaigns? Everyone gets the same budget? That means money has no sway over politicians and money can't influence the result unfairly.

Re: House Democrats to propose ban on lawmaker stock trading – report

#196

Post by nextstep »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #189
mikeyouse wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump spent hundreds of millions of dollars officially, outside groups that don't need to report all of their spending (like the NRA) spent further hundreds of millions, and he had hundreds of millions worth of "earned media" due to the circus-like nature of the campaign. Because he spent marginally less than Ted Cruz in the primary and less than Hillary in the general doesn't give lie to the premise at all. His 2020…

Trump is still proof an outsider can win. He needed money but someone outside the political class still came in and won despite his parties best efforts against it (at the beginning when he was just a primary candidate they made their bed with his now).

“An outsider”? Trump is a billionaire who has been directly involved in politics for decades.

Re: House Democrats to propose ban on lawmaker stock trading – report

#197

Post by pookha »

rgbrgb wrote: post #163
deltarholamda wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fix for this was in the founding documents. We just jacked it up over the years. Congress passes laws. They aren't supposed to pass a vague law and then hand over the actual rule-making to unelected government bureaucracies. The House is the people's house. Each Representative represents some relatively equal number of constituents. The Senate is the States' house. The state legislatures sends senators. The Senat…

Trying to get clarification, as a layman here I think I'm missing your point. My understanding is that laws are by their nature kind of vague because the world is full of edge cases and they always require interpretation as they encounter new cases. > hand over the actual rule-making to unelected government bureaucracies. Are you referring to the judicial branch? Isn't that the system laid out in the founding docs? >…

I'm pretty sure he's railing against an EU commission-like government where unelected bureaucrats create legislation. In the US only elected representatives can draft legislation (House or Senate).

Re: House Democrats to propose ban on lawmaker stock trading – report

#198

Post by Aunche »

hayst4ck wrote: post #105

Lawrence Lessig (Harvard law professor famous for fighting for sane copyright law) does a great presentation on the root cause of Americas problems. He also ran for president in 2016. It can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJy8vTu66tE The short version is that to win primaries you need money. Money mainly comes from corporations and rich people. Taking money from corporations and rich people creates…

IMO, politicians are doing exactly what the people are asking for, which is spending their time virtue signalling rather than writing and negotiating meaningful legislation. Besides that, they do care about handouts, which is why we have so much pork barrel spending and stimulus checks.

It's convenient to blame money in politics, but if that were the case, Congress would at least get something done. For example, Facebook, despite being one of the most heavy lobbying spenders, has spent even more money establishing their content Oversight Board. If they could actually buy politicians, we'd have more regulation that happens to benefit big tech. Both the Republican solution of not allowing social media companies to censor content and the Democratic solution of creating more rules for moderate disinformation are beneficial to Facebook because they can offload some of the responsibility of moderation to the government.

Re: House Democrats to propose ban on lawmaker stock trading – report

#199

Post by Pulcinella »

eloff wrote: post #195
hayst4ck wrote: post #105

Lawrence Lessig (Harvard law professor famous for fighting for sane copyright law) does a great presentation on the root cause of Americas problems. He also ran for president in 2016. It can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJy8vTu66tE The short version is that to win primaries you need money. Money mainly comes from corporations and rich people. Taking money from corporations and rich people creates…

Wouldn't this be solved rather easily by prohibiting fund raising and using tax dollars to finance campaigns? Everyone gets the same budget? That means money has no sway over politicians and money can't influence the result unfairly.

Would you enforce that on “friends of the campaign” as well? E.g. Political Action Committees. John Jackson is running for political office using only public money. However, Big Titanium Inc. creates the privately run and funded “Friends of John Jackson” organization that is entirely unaffiliated with John Jackson but nevertheless runs pro-John Jackson ads in TV.

Re: House Democrats to propose ban on lawmaker stock trading – report

#200

Post by ericmay »

tootallgavin wrote: post #104
ericmay wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why? So keeping in mind this doesn't preclude lawmakers from investing or buying index funds or ETFs, but the reason is because they literally create legislation that benefits certain companies. CHIPS Act is a recent example. So they can do something like buy stock in a company, and then advocate for a law to pass that benefits that company, and then make money by doing that. What we want to do is separate "what's…

> There's no real reason for a lawmaker or their immediate family to be buying individual stocks. You lost me here. Participating in society is okay. Maybe in the case of a judge, who is supposed to be impartial, this could be the case. But an insulated lawmaker is definitely not the way to go. If a lawmaker riuns his financial status via the stockmarket, cool! Elect someone else. > So they can do something like buy…

> Which politicians are interested in "what's good for the country" over "what's good for me"? And why is that why anyone is elected? I though we voted on issues, ideologies, directions-to-go-in and policy etc.

Well that's kind of a bad argument, because if "we voted on issues..." we're just declaring that this is one of the issues (etc.) that needs voted on and the resolution is to prohibit these transactions...

So the issue we elected politicians to fix was politicians trading stocks. The ideology is that politicians shouldn't trade stocks because they vote on bills that they have inside knowledge on. The direction to go in is not allowing politicians to hold individual stocks. The policy is they can't own individual stocks going forward. And this is a thing we voted on.

> They could do same thing with real estate or vehicles or guns or anything else.

So I won't rule out everything but in your examples of guns and gold that would also prohibit the politician from selling those things or having to give them up as well.

While I see where you are coming from with the rest of your post, you're taking the stance that everything is effectively the same so why are people singling out stock trading, whereas I think there are shades of gray. Frankly, (as you mentioned real estate) the only reason that isn't in the spotlight as much is because it doesn't happen at the federal level but at the state and local level. There are a ton of injustices that still occur. Like buying a property and then voting to change the zoning or something similar.

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