641–650 of 684 posts
Yeah they'll move it in-house... after they just fired all the new hires from this year. I'm sure they'll be able to find a bunch of experienced devs with clearances who want to work near DC for 50k/yr.
I know some solid gov (some ex-gov now) tech folks in DC. These are experienced, staff+ engineer types who want meaningful work. The pay isn't that low. Is it FAANG level? No. But they're still making solid six figure salaries.
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On the other hand, I don't think most citizens care deeply about most white-collar crimes unless they're directly impacted. If you don't own stocks, why care if the stock market crashes? Heck, it might even be fun to watch all those richies with spare money to invest turn suicidal en masse. There's a reason why "but his 34 felonies" never had any sticking power to anyone who hasn't been part of the resistance since 2…
I don’t think it has anything to do with whether it was a white collar crime or not. If it was the other team that committed the crime there would be endless outrage from his supporters whether or not they understood the crime. Look at the email server debacle, did the supporters understand what the crime was? Then Signalgate occurred and it’s crickets in the news now. Freedom of speech now means freedom to spread mi…
Many of these people don't have meaningful retirement savings to lose. Or they're young enough that time in the market will expect to recover in 30 years.
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"I asked him if it was fair on the waitress earning $13 per hour to subsidize the student loan of a Law school graduate. He changed the subject deftly." Excellent point.
How much in Federal income taxes does someone making $26,000 a year pay? Single, no child, no subsidized savings...around $1,000. 1 Child...negative several thousands dollars. That's assuming all income is being reported.
Here's another valid perspective: the Federal money that went to subsidize the Law student's degree... it could have gone to infrastructure in a way that could have materially improved the waitress's life. Or it could have increased her child credit. Or it could have been used to incentivize her (in various ways) to seek an educational or skills upgrade.
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I agree with basically all of this. The one distinction I would make is that the pay reduction is real terms is across all kinds of domains so I don’t think it’s particularly unique of physicians, but part of a larger issue. Same with the cost of education/training etc. In other words, I think the healthcare issues you highlight may be emblematic of bigger systemic problems. With all that said, it’s still a different…
I do think substantially increasing Congress’s pay would result in better politicians. Dishonest people who are only in it for the money can find plenty of ways to profit from the office. As it stands, $174k is not a whole lot of money for a job that requires a ton of travel to the extent of basically requiring you to own two houses. This low pay means that non-wealthy members of Congress have a hard time of it. Non-…
Ignoring all the other non-salary pay they get, I'll buy that low pay can select for rich politicians because it means you can't rely on your Congressional salary to make ends meet. But it only selects for corrupt politicians if the main motivation is to make money. That is the presupposition that seems to frame your whole argument, and the one I have been pushing back on since the original comment. That sentiment undergirds the premise that pay is commensurate with ability. We can create systems that don't select for people with a primary motivation related to financial gain. $10MM salaries ain't it, though.
Someone who just wants to be in Congress to make a sweet $10 million in honest pay would be infinitely better than most of the people there right now.
This just doesn't make sense in the context of what you've previously said. Based on your above post, you're saying low pay selects for corruption because they're in it for the money. But giving $10MM a year selects for people who are in it for the money, meaning you have the same problem. I fail to see how that selects for better people than are there currently if it gives the same incentives.
If you re-read my original comment, I advocate for a "reasonable" salary, but not one that selects for people who have money as their primary motivation. I think there's an argument that $174k/yr is not reasonable for Congress person. We could increase that (and there are proposals to do so*) while also having the guardrails in place that don't disproportionately select for people who care more about money than their constituents.
*I suspect there is more at play than just Congressional salary. E.g., the civil servant salary ceiling is pegged to Congressional pay, so there are second-order effects to consider.
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They absolutely have the consent of Congress. Congress can stop this at any time. They elect not to. Their silence is consent in this case. You can attribute that silence to active support or cowardice but either way they can stop it and don't so they approve of it. "In democracy loving areas of the British Empire, that type of arbitrary action led to revolutions." Not sure if you have taken a look at Britain lately…
> absolutely have the consent of Congress. Congress can stop this at any time. They elect not to. I don’t mean to be graphic, but being forced into silence (“you could have stopped me”) is absolutely not consent. The Trump administration is full of people who will need to go to jail if were to keep our republic.
* - readers, please note that I said "most", not "all", so a couple counterexamples would not have any bearing on the statement.
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Again, this assumes the main motivation is money. Ie if they could get a better paying job, they would. You can select for highly skilled people who also aren’t putting money as the top priority. The point I’m getting at is that pay can be a noisy proxy for skill and we should probably not assume they are tightly correlated in all domains. One person once said the people at the NSA are much more like Marines than Sil…
I guess the problem I see is that I can think of a lot of careers (teachers, basically all of healthcare, certain kinds of engineers, etc.) where "below market pay" is translating to shortages and the need to push under or unqualified workers into roles they're not suited for. This leads me to believe that the problem isn't necessarily finding some highly skilled people to accept below-market rates for mission-drive…
I'm not sure the pay argument holds. For example, where I live, the average starting teacher salary is higher than the median overall salary. When you couple that with the fact they are on 4-day workweeks and get substantial time off (summers/holidays), the pro-rated pay is actually reasonably high for a starting salary. (Granted, I think it hits a ceiling relatively fast.) From talking to them, I suspect the driving force that make it hard to retain teachers is the lack of quality of life. I think it was Csikszentmihalyi who talks about the need for autonomy in one's career for it to be fulfilling, and the current system seems to limit that to an extreme. Just like u/lotsofpulp's comments about doctors, I think this means the job shifts much of the work from the purpose teachers chose the profession in the first place, and leads to burnout.
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On the other hand, I don't think most citizens care deeply about most white-collar crimes unless they're directly impacted. If you don't own stocks, why care if the stock market crashes? Heck, it might even be fun to watch all those richies with spare money to invest turn suicidal en masse. There's a reason why "but his 34 felonies" never had any sticking power to anyone who hasn't been part of the resistance since 2…
I don’t think it has anything to do with whether it was a white collar crime or not. If it was the other team that committed the crime there would be endless outrage from his supporters whether or not they understood the crime. Look at the email server debacle, did the supporters understand what the crime was? Then Signalgate occurred and it’s crickets in the news now. Freedom of speech now means freedom to spread mi…
The other one was a private email server, set up on purpose.
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Yeah, structural changes don't happen slowly and by the rules. What people don't like is what they think the new system is going to look like. But we don't know what that is going to be because Trump seems to be better at destroying than at building. It will depend on his successor(s) being good at building institutions. Or it may fail and the old system regenerates.
This seems accurate to me. They are destroying many US institutions, and what replaces them may be better or may be worse. I am not sure anyone can tell right now. This wouldn't be happening if everyone was happy with the status quo, if the US was in a golden era, but it wasn't. Many things clearly weren't working. Sometimes it's easier to tear something down and rebuild it than fix it (not always, but sometimes).
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Plus, many of the laws government has to follow are exactly about the process by which things are done. That is what helps ensure it is fair, effective, transparent, etc.
Fair and transparent are arguable. I have never met someone who deals with the government on a regular basis that has ever described it as effective, and at this point I am willing to sacrifice some fairness and transparency for effectiveness.
You may not put much stock in another billionaire's opinion, but personally I think he's been engaged with our system enough to have a good perspective on things.
That doesn't mean every government operations are 90% efficient, but I'd rather walk the side of slowness and bureaucracy than graft and corruption, let alone Trump's outright fascism.
And by the way, my father worked at a federal manufacturing plant so I've heard plenty of stories, good and bad.