this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.