41–50 of 57 posts
You should see the parade of politicians with hands out marching into tech offices prior to elections. You should also notice how tech is now so on message with whatever the politicians push. It is as if they are part of the power structure.
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do you really think Pelosi and other lifetime democrats are any less corrupt than republicans?
There is no doubt.
Russian, Ukrainian and Chinese wiki have an article about “Power of a phone call” (Law by a phone call), which is when in a corrupted state you can solve any problem by calling someone powerful you’re connected to. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%B5%D1%84... https://ru-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/%D0%A2%D0%B5%...
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"Warren re-ups bill to ban stock trading by lawmakers" https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2020/12/18/elizabeth-warre... Ultimately the voters of her district have to care.
Barring lawmakers from investing in equities seems like it would be another barrier for non-wealthy people to be politicians. EDIT: Why the downvotes? Middle class people use the stock market for their retirement funds. If you take away this ability or you take away the salary of lawmakers, you are restricting it to people who are already affluent.
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>only gets paid 225k salary That is six times the American median wage, or alternatively it places you in the top 3% of the American income distribution. Is this a bad attempt at sarcasm? That salary, plus I assume a generous pension is enough for her to not own any stocks, which I actually think is something that should be the norm for political representatives, given the blatant conflict of interest.
> top 3% of the American income distribution Pelosi has a good claim to being the most powerful woman in the US, and she makes less than a twentysomething hotshot engineer/banker/consultant/whatever. Any system that actually cared about her not being tempted by conflicts of interest would pay her two more zeroes. You can of course ask why 225k isn't enough, and you can moralise all you want about how 225k should be m…
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Unfortunately people are greedy. I don't think there's a generous salary that would cause them to not want more. They could be making $50M a year, and they would still want more. I don't know what the solution would be, perhaps your suggestion isn't too bad and a good start.
> I don't think there's a generous salary that would cause them to not want more. The point is that you give them a generous salary and take it away if they misbehave. Every carrot is a stick in waiting.
They also get speaking fees, book sales, etc.
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The way to do it is to give a very generous salary and to simultaneously crack down hard on even the appearance of impropriety. Neither is being done right now, and part of the reason is that you can't really do one without the other[1], so you're stuck in a bit of a catch-22. [1] You can't crack down on on public servants questionably but not clearly criminally making money on the side if everyone that's supposed to…
I think you can crack down on even the appearance of corruption without paying huge salaries. I don't see why not. The two concerns seem orthogonal to me. I think we should crack down on even the appearance of corruption in judges, prosecutors, FBI agents, etc. Does that mean we need to pay each of them so much that they are effectively unbribe-able? Finally, it seems very strange to answer clear-in-aggregate corrupt…
Why don’t we use the security clearance model? We don’t pay people that work in intelligence operations huge salaries, but we also don’t want them sell secrets to Russia. Any of them could be bribable. So we do extensive background checks and evaluate their finances, criminal record, foreign contacts, etc. for red flags. Then investigate, suspend, or revoke clearances based on any new red flags that come in. We could do a version of that for legislators. We won’t, but we could.
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>only gets paid 225k salary That is six times the American median wage, or alternatively it places you in the top 3% of the American income distribution. Is this a bad attempt at sarcasm? That salary, plus I assume a generous pension is enough for her to not own any stocks, which I actually think is something that should be the norm for political representatives, given the blatant conflict of interest.
Pelosi doesn't get paid enough. She's one of the leaders of a country with a $23T economy and a $4.8T federal budget. She maintains houses in two different (very) high COL areas, and has a punishing work and travel schedule. We'd be shocked at an exec in a round C company, helping lead 100+ people, who didn't make more than that.
Pelosi is a vile and corrupt politician. Not surprised she got a call but I hope she’s raked over the coals for it.