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Tax All religions, it’s a business. Make everyone pay into Social Security, no income caps. Move retirement age back to 65 for everyone, and early (reduced benefits) to 62.
Oh man. My husband is a journeyman electrician (IBEW). He is 57. Has had a hip replacement. He is hyper-focused on his diet and tracks all calories, hits the gym 5 days a week. Yet he has bone on bone arthritis in his shoulders, his left knee has no meniscus and he has popped his IT band 3 times in the last 4 months. He is on a job that has gone OT, tons of ladder climbing and stairs. Meanwhile the shoppie employees huddle with their phones while he is responsible for the switch gear. He really wants to retire. He has his full pension credits.
I am a nurse (60) with 27 years experience. I just spent a weekend on service and there was very little transport staffing. I ended up having to transport the patients to the nuclear medical dept and then wait. One had to travel on the tele so I told his nurse to bring him down and leave the equipment. After his testing was done… I hooked him back up and brought him to his floor and of course, the bed was out of battery charge WAFB, I was worn out.
We are both retirement curious. I was thinking… maybe get all our expenses on a spreadsheet, star the ones that can be reduced or eliminated, get all our most recent sheets together and see a financial advisor. We are kind of tired of carrying the 30 somethings honestly… We are Gen X and actually didn’t expect we would live this long. Honestly… we have kept our communities running for a long time and are ready for others to take over.
Personally, I 'd love to go somewhere like Portugal or Italy for a few years and wait out this MAGA mess. Our kid lives less than 3 blocks away though and we do want to be involved grandparents. It is a difficult choice in these times. I hope we can convince them to come with us. The fact is… this nation under Trump will become a prison if you wait long enough.
Hold up. You’re 60 and on Lemmy? That is super cool. I hope I’m that cool when I get there.
As for moving away, I noped out to Korea just before Trump. Just coincidence of timing. Expat life is great, but be ready for a hefty dose of loneliness unless you can get in on the language. You can find other expat communities, but you end up needing to be less picky about your friends, which isn’t necessarily bad.
In any case, I hope your husband catches a break and lasts too retirement. Good luck with everything
I’m leary about taxing religion, only because they would try to leverage that for more government influence than they already have.
We literally have a christian nationalist government right now and the churches are not being taxed fairly. Your taxes pay for things they want and use. And they abuse those tax free donations & income they get because there is no reporting to the IRS. Religions are a business. You take in money for a service, it’s a business. Most religions are not actually helping people, like the homeless, food kitchens, or fundraising for those in need. If you had the ability to see where all the finances go from a ‘church’, you would never give money, or defend them again. Even non-religious charities don’t give back as much as they claim, Goodwill is a great example.
Tax all religions fairly.
With how broken our justice dept is, I don’t trust that they would twist regulation is ways to legally ban other religions, potentially in the near future using “historical precident”. I’m not against properly classifying large donors as PAC’s and needing super churches to get rid of their tax status. I think we can workshop something really targeted to not be used against the spirit of the law.
I agree, we don’t tax a variety of non-profits. Including simple social clubs all the way to universities. I don’t like the idea of taxing all of those either.
Religion seems to get a lot of benefits other non-profits don’t though. So I’m down to level the playing field, and maybe there is some way to alter tax law to punish the mega-churches specifically
I like the idea of targeting mega-churches. Maybe do it based on outreach. If the people attend in person, they can donate cash in hand with no taxes or anything, but if it is televised and donations come in from online or the phone, those get taxed.
I refuse to believe any of this is actually endorsed or supported by the Democratic Party of The United States.
It’s all great. And I’d love to be wrong. But there’s no way.
I refuse to believe any of this is actually endorsed or supported by the Democratic Party
I don’t see it claiming to be.
It’s also things dems refuse to acknowledge are needed when in power
For other countries yes, but the US won’t vote again
Like I get the whole moralistic bent about not wanting to pay representatives big incomes relative to their constituents because politician bad and “they should be doing it for the pride of serving”, or like term limits because “I don’t like these politicians and they keep getting reelected/ serve life terms.”
But realistically, if you want skilled professionals in a field, you need to pay them competitively and offer long term career prospects. Otherwise you’re going to only get people who take the job as a stepping stone to another position, like a high paying job at a big company they passed a bunch of laws to help, or who can make money in other ways.
As it stands right now, the whole stock trading thing is largely a result of how little congress people are payed relative to the importance of the position. Like, sure, it’s a six figure salary with a great benefits package, but, that’s peanuts compared to what a modern private sector executive make, even a mediocre one.
If anything, congress people should probably have their wages increased significantly.
They can have that when they start serving the got damn people like they’re supposed to
Well, not really, according to the banner “Cap Politicians Wages to 1.5x Median Wage in their district” that’s really not a lot. Even if they made 150k it would still be less than they could be making with their law degrees or by working as a lobbyist for big companies.
We can tie it to the median wage without fixating on that exact multiplier they can also consider ways to raise the median wage…
Yeah I agree it’s a good idea, I also agree that it isn’t competitive.
Fastest way to raise the median wage is to kick out the poor and stop all social housing projects, turn everything expensive and boooom, median wage goes up. I think that’s a perverse incentive and is actually hurting representatives that take good care of poor people, who, because of that, move to the district. It’s also a glaring loophole.
No if we’re gone tie pay to performance, we need better tools to evaluate performance.
The poor overwhelmingly do things that need to be done and often these physical tasks unlike office jobs are the least automatable. Few people by percentage live in any sort of social housing and there is no short term way to toss every poor person onto the street while not also ruining most of the rich people.
This is really an imaginary problem.
Counterpoints:
It’s really, really good messaging, to a population that reads at a 6th grade level.
The entire point is that being a Representative is not supposed to be a lucrative career path to become wealthy, it is supposed to be public service.
Also, overturning Citizens United, in a fully comprehensive way, would make… not all, but a whole, whole lot of currently ‘standard’ lobbying (ie legalized bribery) completely fucking illegal.
Also also, if you can ‘tax billionaires out of existence’, presumably by actually effectively taxing their wealth, as well as capping CEO pay, and all other forms of non direct income compensation…
… well then you don’t actually have a giant wealth disparity society, you have a functional upper bound once you ‘win’ capitalism, thus much less dark money to throw at lobbyists as well as an upper bound to how lucrative it csn be to throw away all your principles and embrace your inner sadistic narcissistic sociopathy.
…
I would add to this platform …maybe the bullet point slogan would be ‘death penalty for corporations’.
What I mean by that is something like this:
Ok, your corporation and its executive officers committed some heinous crime, that we normallly punish with fines, fines that are almost always a pittance in comparison to how much money that corp has?
Well ok, first, stop doing fines that way, peg them instead to a % of net income. Not net profits, net income.
If this results in bankruptcy of the corp?
Oh well, too bad.
Ok, then, if a corp is convicted of some massive legal violation, do something like every single C suite level employee in that corp, in its holding company, whatever… yeah they are now all barred from holding any such positions at any kind of organization, in any capacity, for the rest of their lives.
Guilt by association, you were part of a criminal enterprise, get fucked, you asshats obviously will not actually ‘organically’ create a ‘company culture’ of anything other than normalizing corruption, so here’s a bigger stick to whack you with, to discourage such behavior.
…
Also, its now illegal for an individual to sit on more than one of any kind of corporate, government regulatory body, elected government position, non profit / lobbying board within a 5 year period. Maybe 10 years.
No more incestuous boards of directors where one person sits on 3 to 8 boards all at the same time, and there is now a 5 (maybe 10) year cool down period when you leave one high level board, before you can join another, no more immediate pipeline from industry to regulatory capture.
Maybe the bullet point slogan for this could be ‘End the Corporate Deep State’.
Is it technically accurate as a term? I don’t care, it feels right, with our current era colloquial lingo.
…
EDIT
Also, the min wage needs to be Federally mandated to be indexed to a State’s average median income and actual cost of living.
There is a lot of variance between States economic CoLs and AMIs, but broadly, a bare minimum for a national, all areas averaged together, min wage… is more like $30-$35 literally right now, if you interperet the min wage to be a living wage, as it was set out to be by FDR.
So really, for a broad number, a 2028 platform would need to be at least $30, not $20…
But more specifically, Federally mandate that every State uses an index calculation that takes into account cost of food and utilities, median income, median rent… make it so that its actually possible for annout of high school 18 yo to get a full time job and be able to afford a studio apartment, without going into debt or needing a cosigner.
If they are so skilled, they should be able to raise the median wage in their district. Thus increasing their own wage.
Yes they could but they can also just work a job that actually pays well without waiting for a district wide socioeconomic restructuring because as people tried to explain to you already that pay isn’t competitive.
In fact, even if the Median Wage increased vastly they would STILL make more money as a lawyer because they would have more clients willing to pay more.
In every possible way, I don’t want skilled professionals as representatives. Even if you get one they are only a skilled professional in ONE, maybe TWO areas - COMPLETELY inadequate for the vast number of areas the government is tasked with managing. That specialized knowledge is what the career bureaucrats the administration is gleefully firing are for.
I want someone who can ASK and LISTEN to skilled professionals, detect and reject bullshit from scam artists, and feels a responsibility to make decisions that benefit their constituents. There are 10 year olds that fit that description.
What you described is critical thinking, a skill extensively taught in higher education. So, you do want experts.
Critical thinking is taught in higher education, but not EXCLUSIVELY so, and unlike specialized knowledge can be obtained in any number of ways.
If I want someone to build me a highway, I’ll ask a civil engineer.
If I want someone to figure out a tax impact, I’ll ask an economist.
If I want someone to make good decisions, I’ll pick someone with a proven track record of making good decisions without letting their own egos or misplaced ideas of their own expertise outside their areas of knowledge get in the way.
That might be a professional.
It might be a bartender.
It might be a scout leader.
It’s entirely dependent on the individual person.
I would say 98% of critical thinkers were taught in formal higher education settings. Scoutmasters and Bartenders MIGHT be good people, they might even have higher education, but I don’t think they’d be great planners and leaders without an education.
I don’t disagree that higher education teaches critical thinking, but I think you are drastically overestimating the extent to which it is the exclusive domain through which people receive it.
I can’t say I don’t understand why. You can find some really good counterexamples among the uneducated.
But among them you can also find brilliant decision makers who AREN’T driven primarily by their own ambition and egos. Likewise, among professionals, you can find an ENDEMIC number who run only for personal ambition, have an overinflated estimation of their own ability to make decisions outside their area of expertise, and make decisions with a certain level of ingrained disdain for people they view below them.
There are good professionals who do care and don’t run for ambition’s sake, but in the case of them, the idea they need high compensation, which is where this discussion started, should be a moot point. Politics is intended to be a public SERVICE, not a full-time job with private industry-equivalent compensation. If it’s not enough to serve because you want to do something to better your constituency, I don’t want you in the role.
I’m not saying there aren’t uneducated nincompoops, or that there aren’t extremely competent and humble professionals running for office. All I’m saying is, given what I’ve seen of the patterns of who actually runs, all else being equal, unless I’ve seen evidence to the contrary in an individual, I will take a sincere, competent layman with sincere intentions over a professional every time.
But among them you can also find brilliant decision makers who AREN’T driven primarily by their own ambition and egos. Likewise, among professionals, you can find an ENDEMIC number who run only for personal ambition, have an overinflated estimation of their own ability to make decisions outside their area of expertise, and make decisions with a certain level of ingrained disdain for people they view below them.
I think there is plenty of data which shows hatred, self-service, arrogance, and greed all correlate highly with lower levels of education. Exceptions make the rule. Look at the USA as an example, educated individuals lean left hard while the right literally just dismantled the department of education and makes teaching some subjects a crime. But me saying theres data probably means nothing to you, since you don’t respect experts.
I’ll thank you not to put words in my mouth. I never said I don’t respect experts, and I have REPEATEDLY throughout this conversation referred to experts as the EXCLUSIVE source of reliable knowledge, and information about options and consequences, so I’ll thank you not to be disingenuous about my words.
That said, what I HAVE said is that those experts OBTAIN AND INTERPRET the data, and at that point, the decision no longer requires a PHD. The extensive studying and the information and options are now boiled down, and the making of the decision is left to a politician.
If that politician is, say, a constitutional lawyer, and this a decision about say, bridge tolls for a road maintenance fund, the lawyer doesn’t have ANYTHING more to contribute to the decision making than the bartender. Any speculative professional knowledge he’s using here is OUTSIDE his area of expertise. The bartender is FAR more likely to accept this and make the decision based on what is in front of them. The lawyer is FAR more likely to either feel like their professional knowledge gives them some special insight outside their area of expertise, a phenomenon known as “epistemic trespassing”. And you actually see this in practice ALL THE TIME.
On the other hand, if the bartender is the politician, and we really need the lawyer’s expertise on constitutional law? They can hire him. People don’t LOSE the benefit of his knowledge because he isn’t in the office.
I want someone who can ASK and LISTEN to skilled professionals, detect and reject bullshit from scam artists, and feels a responsibility to make decisions that benefit their constituents.
It is a skill. You need professionals in that skill
If you truly believe the ability to listen to professionals, ask questions, and make decisions based on direct information is only something highly paid professionals can do, I don’t know how to begin to address the massive gap in our premises. I assume you’re not a doctor, but when the doctor gives you health information and options, you don’t fumble around helplessly. If you hire someone to build you a house and they present you with multiple options, I assume you’re not an architect either, but you don’t panic and decide to live in a tent instead.
There is a huge difference between deciding for yourself and deciding for a big group of people you don’t really know.
The first can be solved by intuition and emotional thinking (I don’t want to have surgery because I’m more worried about it more than about taking medicines for a much longer time, I want a two story house because it looks good…). While taking care of a nation is wildly different. You are confronted with massive, intertwined systems, in which many people that live life completely different than yours are affected. You have to constantly challenge your assumptions and compare them to a mountain of data. Yes, you have advice, but each advice always relates to a small section of the whole problem.
While such critical thinking skills can be learned in many ways (and they often elude our politicians) it usually require a higher education degree and quite some experience after that to develop. People that have honed this skill are valuable in the job market, and therefore should receive appropriate compensation.
I was right there with you until you started talking about appropriate compensation.
Politics is a service, like military service. The military is compensated well, but you certainly can’t argue they’re doing better than a professional would with the same skills. The same applies to political office. It is an act of self-sacrifice for the betterment of your constituency. If the fact of serving your constituents is not enough, I don’t care about your skillset - I don’t want you in the office. This should be a calling - not a career.
As someone that followed that mindset, and got stuck in positions that are much lower payed than the private sector, that refined my skills to an absurd level just to get payed around median level… that’s why I’m looking for jobs outside the public sector, that’s why basically all my colleagues feel burned out and unappreciated. A good read in this aspect: https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/
A bit of sacrificing is okay, but as a politician you are already sacrificing a lot of your personal life (long, constant trips that make difficult to maintain contracts outside of work, lots of after hours events that affect your social life, often having to full on move for your job…) How far does self sacrifice need to go?
As a side: I also would like all other public sector jobs to be much better payed.
I absolutely won’t disagree with you that public sector pay should be higher, particularly for publicly important positions, but let’s also be clear that politicians and public employees aren’t actually the same thing. A public employee is committing long-term to doing a full-time job in a particular domain as a lifetime career.
Political offices are largely intended to be temporary caretaker positions to be done as a self-sacrifice. Career politicians have become the rule recently, but it is by no means by intent of design.
There is a huge difference between these two roles.
Congressional representatives have a service of 2 years. This is not onerous. They can come from all walks of life but should probably go back to private life after their term unless they have provided such exemplary service they deserve a second term. However, I feel they should be term limited. If they wish to continue to serve the public, they can run for the Senate or run for office in their state/locality.
Senators have a service of 6 years which is a bit longer but then, their function is more professional… like they have to hold hearings, investigations and approve for executive level agency leadership and judges. They do need more seasoning, education and a higher public service commitment. They should have a clear understanding of the Constitution and high ethical standard for themselves and others. I don’t think they should serve for more than one term, 2 terms tops.
That folksy wisdom of applying common sence and do what’s right doesn’t work when it’s about faith of a millions. If I hire shitty builder because he was too convincing, and then chose wrong option because I am indeed not an architect, worst case scenario my house will be a bit fucked. If a politician makes the same mistakes, millions of people will die. So for a regular shmo this skill has small consequences and doesn’t have to be this strong.
You’re saying “listen to professionals” as if there is always one professional with one opinion and your options is to listen to him or not, but it’s almost never the case in complex questions.I’ll say it again…
An expert/professional in one field does not have special knowledge that makes them better at making decisions in another. It just doesn’t. And finding the wrong experts is a miss that a professional could JUST as easily make.
And I’m sorry, for the VAST majority of elected offices, the stakes just are not that high. No city council member in a city of a few hundred thousand is making decisions that affect the fate of millions. But it’s EXTREMELY easy for someone with greater ambition than that city council to sell out the constituents of that city in exchange for aid to get to a higher office, and it happens ALL THE TIME.
I’ll say it again… a reasonable, competent individual with low ambition and good decision making is, all else being equal, a better choice.
See that’s where limiting CEO pay comes in.
the whole stock trading thing is largely a result of how little congress people are payed relative to the importance of the position.
Completely unreal. Given an opportunity to legally trade on the information available to them people with 6 and 7 figure salaries will act identically to maximize their benefit. At present in many difficult and valuable professions you can obtain the best of the best for less than what congress is paid. There is no reason to believe that lifetime benefits, 174k and the prestige of leading the nation is insufficient to attract excellent candidates.
If the candidates presently in play are often trash it is because other factors select for same not because of insufficient compensation.
When we pay more, we attract vermin. I’d happily serve for a pittance because I want to make the world better, and so would many others. If you want to get rich, don’t serve in Congress!
There was a great politician wanna-be in my town. Loved what he had to say, but he couldn’t survive on the $6K a year it pays.
We gotta pay for leadership. Otherwise they’ll just go to the private sector and get real money. Despite lemmy’s loathing of CEOs, they run the show and the entire company culture flows down from them. Ever worked a shit job? Had a sweet job? Ask yourself, how did the CEO act? Same for politicians.
I can counter my own argument by saying that most of their money comes from other sources once elected. Some of that money is fine, much is immoral. So it goes.
Obviously, we should pay congresspeople a living wage. I’m not sure that’s controversial. $6k a year is too low, $150k is too high.
Those CEOs you’re talking about are good right where they are. I want AOC, not Tim Cook.
Ok, but, like, no offense, are you skilled enough to properly analyze and dig through large complicated bills? Are you a skilled enough administrator to manage an office of staffers? Are you a good enough public speaker to campaign?
I’m not saying people should want to serve in congress because it pays well, but, if the same set of skills that make a good representative could earn you 4 million a year in the private sector, then it’s going to be really hard to get qualified professionals. Instead you’ll get incompetent ideologues, independently wealthy aristocrats, or corrupt individuals intending to abuse the position.
It needs to pay competitively or else you create a bunch of perverse incentives.
Ok, but, like, no offense, are you skilled enough to properly analyze and dig through large complicated bills? Are you a skilled enough administrator to manage an office of staffers?
Are most politicians? They generally use their staff and their chief of staff for those things. The only thing that I’d grant them across the board, generally, is they are decent at public speaking.
There are many people that have specialized training that do their work to serve, not for the money (e.g. teachers, public defenders, MSF, etc…)
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Damn bro I need to know what school you got a math degree from if your logical reasoning is that faulty!
I’m fairly sure my “logical reasoning” is spot-on, but feel free to correct me.
A law, philosophy, or poli sci degree from a no name college holds a hell of a lot more weight for politics than a mathematics degree from Harvard. Know your limits.
Online rankings seem to put Harvard pretty high for mathematics! So I wouldn’t disregard their opinion just because their degree is from Harvard. I would disregard their opinion because of how faulty the logic is though.
I appreciate that you like philosophy. If we are interested in intelligence, though, a degree is less important than, say, how well you can do on a test like the LSAT. If we are interested in specialized skills, then a degree and the institution matter an awful lot. Keep in mind, however, that most people with any credentials from any institution are incomprehensibly stupid.
I’m not sure how we would determine whether someone is a good person. That’s significantly more difficult. But certainly nobody motivated by money is a good person.
I like what Singapore does, which is to pay public servants very well, and then heavily punish corruption
They can tie it to the minimum wage. Want a pay boost? Raise the minimum wage.
But realistically, if you want skilled professionals in a field, you need to pay them competitively and offer long term career prospects. Otherwise you’re going to only get people who take the job as a stepping stone to another position, like a high paying job at a big company they passed a bunch of laws to help, or who can make money in other ways.
But this is already what we get anyway. Like 90% of our “representatives” behave this way.
I do agree though that maybe 1.5x is a little low especially since they’re supposedly “required” to maintain a residence closer to d.c as well and that’s super expensive. I’d say the public pay for their housing near d.c and then we can consider lower salaries for them, or at least having them be closer to what their constituents make so they understand what people actually have to go through to get by.
The problem with low salaries is that it makes the job less appealing, so it attracts more corruption. (In theory) if you are payed a lot, you don’t care when someone offers you a little more, while when you are payed little, a little money can make a big difference. Then again, this theory clearly failed, so… who knows
That’s a good thing. Private sector executives are wildly more sociopathic than the general public, and literally the enforcers of poverty on most americans. We should be incentivizing that type of person to stay as far the fuck away from politics as possible.
Wow the capitalism is strong in this one.
Lmao. Unless step number one includes some guillotines, you might as well be asking people if they’d like to go to paradise.
Pure fantasy.
Fuck off.
No.
Dream big. Get balls.
Yes.
A Reality TV star who diddled kids, hid top secret documents in his bathroom, and openly agrees with all of the USA’s enemies is now President, jail free, and has ham fisted the stupidest people alive into a laughablely unreal kakistocracy that nothing else in human history compares to.
This is the fantasy of the biggest idiots alive and it has very much become real. And now that CEO murders are up significantly more than usual, you wanna believe paradise can’t be achieved because the idiots did it first?
Please. It’s a numbers game. And there are far fewer idiots than those who are now suffering from them.
Look man, what do you want? We can do this, or we can go to war. I want to see a fash nailed to every tree, but thats still a big ask.
Sounds great.
Hope you’ve got your guns, because you’ll need them for any of that.
Voting is just for deciding what colour tie your right-wing authoritarianism wears.
That minimum wage pretty slim for a wish list…
Tie minimum wage to inflation. Tie rent to it, too. Im suck of having this discussion. They stonewall on purpose.
Yeah, the minimum wage isn’t so much the problem anymore (maybe in some areas, but definitely not all), it’s the cost of living. If we raise minimum wage, the cost of everything else just gets raised to offset it, particularly the cost of rent/property. At this point, we need to enforce rent caps before raising the wage anymore.
All of this should be simple for any sane politician to get on board with, and yet it’s somehow revolutionary.
I’m impressed with this, someone has clearly given it more than 30s of thought
treating unrealized gains used for collateral as income avoids most of the complicated issues around wealth taxes while still enforcing that you have to pay your fair share if you want to live a life of luxury.
Congressional pay caps seem like a good way to align their incentives with helping all their constituents rather than just the donors and median mean that passing a real minimum wage law is to their direct benefit. No idea how you would get around the increased risk of bribery though.
Fixing gerrymandering, replacing fptp and scrapping the electoral college evens out the voting power so an election is less likely to be swung imby a handful of close districts in swing states.
Striking down Citizens united would (could?) clean up campaign finance making it harder for fossil fuel lobbies (for example) to purchase power.
I don’t know how feasible it is given some of it is federal, some of it is state level and I imagine some of it requires ammending the constitution, but I would consider any candidate who ran on some/all of these to be a good choice focused on fixing the root causes of a lot of the problems the US is facing.
Non-American here: is it possible to objectively outlaw gerrymandering while still having the ability to redraw/create/merge districts?
I thought you do need that mechanism as populations shift from rural to urban (or reverse) so that it’s always the same number of people per congressperson or however it works.
Also non-american but subject to a bunch of us-centricn news anyway 😅
Good question you need to be able to re-draw boundaries, but re-drawing boundaries shouldn’t have a material effect on election results (assuming the same people vote the same way.
I have heard a few proposals like “districts must be regular polygons” or avoiding moving people from contested seats into safe seats.
Neither of them are perfect for a number of reasons (reliance on perdictive models, ways to work around etc.) so the common approach is to appoint an independent redistricting commission to handle it and have them look at a bunch of metrics to figure out if it’s fair.
The nice thing is a perfect solution isn’t even necassary for improvement, just preventing horrorshows like Texas’s 33rd (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas’s_33rd_congressional_district) would help.
The main problem is that a few states passed ballot initiatives to combat gerrymandering, the politicians then undermined or straight up ignored them and then in 2019 the supreme court decided that it wasn’t within the jurisdiction of the federal courts to hear cases around gerrymandering. Funnily enough every single one of the justices who decided they were fine with republicans germandering efforts were appointed by republican presidents who could have guessed?
So now it’s de-facto legal; states run by the democrats are doing similar things and the clearly-acting-in-good-faith pundits on the right are screaming “look both parties are the same see! See!”
Err… I may have strayed from my point a little, but yes IRCs are the way to do this provided they have sufficient legal backing to see that their decisions are enforced.
Thanks for your reply! The 33rd is a great example of how perfect is the enemy of good. So yeah I still think you can’t fix this objectively, but you (politicians) can try a lot harder not to be a corrupt asshole about it.
Keeping congressional salaries that low would encourage corruption and possibly discourage non-corrupt candidates with valuable experience, but I otherwise agree.
yeah, grand scheme of things a few hundred people getting a salary that’s comparable to what they’d get in industry, makes zero difference to total government revenue.
The only reason to make it lower is either out of some weird sanctimonious need to put them in their place, or some idealistic notion that lowering salaries would result in a congress full of serene monk-like sages who exist only to serve their people, when the reality is that it would heavily incentivize even more corruption than we see now.
Give them a million dollars each, and tax them 100% on every penny they make from any other source.
I wouldn’t give them that much, but I wouldn’t cap it as low as OP suggested.
I know it seems like a lot, especially to someone making a regular salary, but I figure it breaks down as $500k for what they would have got working in a similar level position in industry, and $500k to remove any right to complain about not being allowed to keep any of the money from their investments, house sales, book sales, media residuals etc. It’s a number that pretty much everyone can be equally unhappy with.
I’m not simping for millionaires here, just trying to navigate a realistic solution to the underlying problems of corruption and billionaire-level wealth inequality.
You realize that’s the argument they made about Trump, right? “Having no money encourages corruption.” But Trump has money, so he’s less likely to be corrupt.
That is not directly related to what I was saying, no. I did not imply that people with money won’t be corrupt.
Keeping congressional salaries that low would encourage corruption
All available evidence indicates that corruption is independent of salary (or wealth) and needs to be addressed separately.
The stock-trading ban and the low salary address the different issue of venal candidates. We need to do everything possible to keep money-grubbers out of the halls of Congress and in the private sector where the damage these creatures do can be contained.
I would say that capping the CEO pay would also lead to unintended outcomes. CEOs aren’t going to just shrug and say “ok, I’ll take a pay cut”, and they certainly aren’t going to give everyone a raise… instead they will just convert everyone making less than $500k and offer to bring them back on as a contractor. Or they will ‘outsource’ all of their departments to staffing agencies and the “CEO” of the staffing agency will only be making $150k.
It turns out that you can fix that quite easily, have a read of the IR35 laws in the UK.
Pasting from wikipedia:
The legislation introduced in July 2000 is designed to target disguised employment. It uses tests to find out if someone is genuinely in business on their own account or a disguised employee of the client. In this context, “disguised employees” means workers who receive payments from a client via an intermediary, i.e. their own limited company, and whose relationship with their client is such that had they been paid directly they would be employees of the client.
And from that very same article:
It is hard to judge the effectiveness of the legislation since as of 2010 HMRC has not published any figures. On 6 January 2004 Dawn Primarolo was asked in Parliament how many investigations under the IR35 regulation have (a) been initiated, (b) resulted in additional revenue, and © been concluded without securing additional revenue. In a written answer she replied that it was not possible with any accuracy to isolate data relating solely to this legislation.[23]
…
The July 2009 issue of IT Now, the British Computer Society magazine, reported that between April 2002 and March 2008 the Government had raised £9.2 million under IR35 legislation compared to the £220 million that was initially expected.[25]
This amongst many other criticisms!
Those numbers from the mid-2000s are sort of irrelevant because the rules got tightened up a LOT more since then, which leaves you only with that first bit in which you’re trying to claim that lack of data is support for your case.
The reason there’s no 2020s statistics on “how much money did IR35 bring in” is because such a statistic would rely on the calculation of a counterfactual based on how the world worked in the 20th century, making it effectively meaningless as a statistic.
I can however tell you firsthand that I know several people personally whose clients have been forced to take them on as regular staff within the last five years due to recent crackdowns.
Also, one interesting thing I noticed searching just now, is that almost every single piece about IR35 is written by organisations and groups who very much enjoyed not paying tax, so it’s almost entirely hit pieces…
To be honest I don’t have a case to make, I just found it a bit glaring that you mentioned it was “easy to fix” but then referenced an article which didn’t really provide any clear evidence for that. I’m entirely open to the idea of IR35 (though to be honest I haven’t considered it closely), and I can easily believe there are lots of hit pieces, but if it is as easily effective as you claim then there should be academic articles providing evidence even despite the confounding factors.
If what keeps you from serving is money (in excess of a modest living wage), I don’t want you to serve. I want you to fuck off.
Our city council members rock a fat $6K a year. With a $150 a month travel allowance! Nobody’s taking that job without having significant outside income.
I was at a party one time where the lady that owns half of downtown was introducing a runner for city council. Watched Brian Spencer (rich architect) cut her a $1,000 check, on the spot, to get her ear. She won and you know she owed him a favor or two. For a measly $1,000 bucks. Anyway, Spencer was on the council two years later. Imagine that!
Obviously that sucks, but there’s a world of difference between $6k and $200k, and I’m talking about Congress, not your city council or some HOA.
I would agree, but 1.5 times medium income is on the low end.
I’d do it for minimum wage, and I’m not sure I’d trust anyone who wouldn’t.
You are currently working as a politiian or running for office then, I presume?
My understanding was that being a member of Congress is extremely lucrative. I’m saying I would serve if it weren’t. I find its current state repugnant and overrun with parasites.
Lol okay, so you expect others to do work for minimum wage which you would totally in theory do as well just not in reality. Gotcha.
No. I expect people who want to get rich to get the fuck out of Congress.
Capping congressional salary that low is a bad idea - especially with the cost of maintaining homes in their district and DC both. It heavily encourages corruption.
I had a good family friend who was a small business owner. He was the local AC repair guy who worked super hard and built a thriving business. He eventually got into politics and was elected to the US House of Representatives. I was proud of my friend, because while we didn’t agree on a lot of political issues, he was fundamentally a good person and would be different than all the corrupt assholes in government.
He quickly ran into financial issues trying to maintain 2 households - especially since his wife was essentially forced to leave her job to be with him full-time as he went back and forth between his district and DC.
So what did he do? He started accepting help from donors. Then special interests. He started becoming more and more beholden to them as they supported him, and he started getting a taste of the Washington lifestyle.
Now he’s as corrupt as corrupt gets, and I’m ashamed to have called him a friend. Motherfucker even voted against election certification on January 6th.
I truly believe that if Congress paid better, more “Average Joe” politicians could thrive in Washington without having to take dirty money, and my family friend may have been saved.
Capping congressional salary that low is a bad idea
Exactly. Giving someone immense power without giving them pay reflecting that power is just an unstable incentive for corruption.
There are some downstream effects, too. Federal law caps regular federal employee pay to formulas based on the Congressional pay, so plenty of senior managers and Ph.D.-level specialists have their pay capped because Congress hasn’t given itself a raise since 2009, all while inflation has gone up by about 50% in those 16 years. It used to be that federal employees would put up with lower salaries for better job security and belief in the mission, but the current administration has basically torn down those assumptions.
In theory Congress could lift the caps on federal salaries without giving themselves a raise, but I don’t think that’s very likely.
“Maintaining a home in DC”
Require them to live in a government-owned dorm in Washington. It should be a bit like a shitty state school, cinderblock walls, communal showers, etc. They MAY NOT own property in or near the district and MUST stay in their appointed dorm.
We cannot let them believe they’re elite or deserving of anything.
$20 minimum wage is still too low, but better than nothing. Decent outline. Just have to get someone that gives a shit about people into office.
can we fix it with a bread basket index please?
Most countries have this (minimum wage regulated by a regulator). The fact you need an act passed by the legislature every time you want to raise it is ridiculous.
Minimum wage shouldn’t have to exist
If everyone had a universal basic income then people wouldn’t be forced to take a job that doesn’t pay them what they feel like they deserve.
Let the market set the price
If I am willing to do a job for $10 dollars to make extra cash, I should be able to.
If no one is willing to do the job for $10, the company will have to offer more.
Minimum wage is a bandage to a problem of capitalism. Wound being poor people suffering without “minimum”. If you make sure everyone has the “minimum” you fix the problem and don’t need the bandage.
Capitalism doesn’t take into account people have basic needs. It assumes everyone is like a robot waiting for the perfect job to pop up.
The problem is people who are desperate enough will still do it for under market wage.
Plus markets are shit at labor/wages.
Capitalism doesn’t take into account people have basic needs. It assumes everyone is like a robot waiting for the perfect job to pop up.
But your idea is to do exactly that with capitalism
Giving pledge? How about a taking pledge.
Proposed wealth tax:
- 1% over $1M
- 10% over $10M
- 100% over $100M
The proceeds fund UBI. MMW we will have 100x as many millionaires after doing this.
I feel like you’d end up with a lot of people making $99M. Though I can see that being a good thing with prices for whatever the person made money from falling or driving investment instead of hording so it might actually work out
Nah. If it’s a graduated system like our taxes are now, there’s no advantage to staying under the next bracket. Good trying to think of edge cases though
You’d have a ton of people near $10m for sure. It would also be less rewarding to get over $10m. You’d need to make over $10m a year to cap out, so the top 0.01%.
Also note you could still live like a king even in this system. If you made $1b a year, just spend or donate it each year. Go to space, buy a thousand homes for the homeless. But most rich people don’t work to begin so probably not them.
Wealth, not income.
In that case the 100 millionaire becomes homeless?
The only way you’re going to close the wealth gap is by taking it back from them. At this point it’s the only option. The democrats are compromised too completely.
You either have to build within the existing party that is interested in governance, or you build one from scratch.
Each side has extreme challenges and I will support either. We just need to realize we cannot instantly reject flawed allies.
Perhaps a new ‘third’ party can endorse the good Democrats and focus their efforts on removing people like Fetterman from power along with any Republicans. Or from within the party we can push for similar changes.
But we see how that worked out for David Hogg.
100% democrats are also very corrupted. Look at how many of them profit from insider trading.
If you’re going to have a revolution and upheave the system, do it from scratch.
It’s the only way at this point.
Caping their pay like that would assure only rich people could become politicians in poor districts.
Well even more than usual. Fucking Elise Stefanik, she is originally from Albany
Make sure all politicians like in public DC housing that cannot cost any more than what their own district spends on public housing.
