He’s not alone: AOC and others have argued lawmakers should be paid more in order to protect against corruption and make the job more accessible.
He’s not alone: AOC and others have argued lawmakers should be paid more in order to protect against corruption and make the job more accessible.
If you want your politicians to be loyal to a country, you pay them. If you want them to be loyal to corporate interests, you let the corporations pay them. It is obvious the path the US has chosen. Contrast that with Singapore for an example of paying your elite government officials an actual salary and how corruption drops to zero.
You’re not wrong but it’s easy to mix up actual loyalty and being the highest bidder.
That’s the same logic as prople saying we should keep the churches tax free, so they don’t interfere in politics, even thoigh they’re tax free now and already interfering with politics.
Whereas in America, we could pay them millions and there’d still be constant grift. This country has lost any sense of accountability. Too goddamn individualist.
We already overpay them and they already take bribes.
The problem is you don’t pay them very much comparatively and so they take bribes and “gifts” to make up for the salary. Just look at Clarance Thomas. He said he needed a raise or he’d go full on corrupt. He did not get a raise. He went full corrupt.
Or we could, yknow, actually prosecute the corrupt ones. Likely a pipedream, but there is another option besides overpay them or allow blatant corruption.
Yeah. We can do what we do now. Overpay them and allow blatant corruption.
They do this no matter how much money we waste on them.
I hear your point, and it might be true, but it’s only a hypothesis because, in the grand scheme of things, they aren’t paid well relative to other work with significantly lower amounts of responsibility.
A young software developer working at Netflix or Amazon would be making more than them. A Congress person in a whole foods in silicon valley could very easily be the poorest customer in the store.
Scarface said “First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women”. I believe that this is the American dream, at least in the eyes of people who end up in high government.
Their path is different though, power comes first, THEN the money, THEN the women. If we paid them at least enough to enable sexy affairs, I think they could round out the three without as much incentive to go full on corrupt
We could enlist a corp of hot young women from all over the world , and bring them to a private island ….
“We should pay these corrupt pieces of shit even more money, and maybe they’ll stop taking bribes” is a hypothesis we’ve tested PLENTY of times. The results are conclusive: the people we put into office are overpaid at any price, and are corrupt no matter how much money we waste on them.
When has this hypothesis been tested in the USA?
Where are these conclusive results you speak of?
Every single time we gave them a raise.
They’re still corrupt.
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