[slindz]

From my perspective, it costs an awful lot of money to run for office. If the only way to reach office is to convince wealthy people to fund your campaign, it shouldn't be a surprise if their interests wind up getting preferred treatment.

[Florin_Andrei]

The way church and state are supposed to be separate (lots of potential comments here, but let's move on), we should have a separation of money and politics. And for reasons that are quite similar.

It's a public office, where public servants work, for the good of everyone, not for personal enrichment. It's a job just like all the others. It should not be a place where oceans of cash keep sloshing around.

No more lobbying. No more private funding of politics.

[souprock]

That thinking led to the corruption. Any normal senator, governor, or president has the skills to work at a high level in corporate America. That pays better, counting only the legitimate pay. It should be no surprise that voters are seldom able to hire (elect) anybody non-corrupt. We aren't paying market rate for the desired skills or for the level of responsibility.

Senators get about $200,000 and the president gets about $400,000.

At an S&P 500 company, CEO pay is about $15,000,000 on average. Elon Musk gets around $595,000,000. Tim Cook gets around $133,000,000. Sundar Pichai gets around $280,000,000. Satya Nadella gets around $77,000,000.

None of those CEOs have responsibility for tariffs, military operations, hundreds of millions of people, thousands of nuclear weapons, or over 10 million employees.

You get what you pay for.

Proper pay: The senate splits 0.1% of GDP, the house splits 0.1% of GDP, the supreme court splits 0.1% of GDP, and the president gets 0.1% of GDP. Lump the VP in with the senate, probably. That totals 0.4% of GDP for the whole group.

[Florin_Andrei]

> Senators get about $200,000 and the president gets about $400,000.

That's a heck of a lot of money for the vast majority of people.

If that's the real issue, then we're attracting the wrong kind of people to those jobs. Let them stay at the hedge fund instead, do hopefully more limited damage there.

> You get what you pay for.

No, not always. And it's precisely this narrow vision, this absolutization of money that's one of the major causes of the woeful state of the world nowadays.

People in government ought to be focused on doing what's good for the nation, first and foremost. If they go "well, $200k isn't enough for me to do this job", kick them out. That's precisely the wrong kind of person for the job.

I think actually the oodles of money being pumped into politics these days are responsible for drawing some awful characters to it. Remove that motivation, and perhaps you'll have people with very different goals running the show.

You get what you, collectively, value and believe in. America believes in money above all. Well, yeah, then the piles of cash end up ruling supreme. Good luck fixing that mess.

[souprock]

You can pretend that money doesn't matter. You'll get corrupt career politicians and the occasional retired billionaire. Lots of people are more than willing to pretend they don't care about money, if that's your qualification, so that their children and siblings can collect foreign "investment" and "work" as board members for companies wanting influence.

The USA is literally at the bottom in terms of salary divided by GDP. At first I thought we beat a few countries, but they have a head of state that is a distinct job from head of government. I'm also leaving out Pope Francis and a few countries for which GDP data isn't available. Singapore pays $3,052,000 yearly, about half to the president and half to the prime minister.

In dollars for one individual, unadjusted for GDP difference, the USA pays less than: Switzerland, Singapore, Austria, and Ireland. Would you say that those countries are attracting the wrong kind of people as leaders? Counting the sum of head of state and head of government, these also pay more: Iceland, Hong Kong, Australia, Canada, Germany, and numerous kingdoms.

Anyway, do you like what you're getting for politicians? Without change, you'll get more of it. You can wish for the most fantastic altruistic leader with no family to support, and just hope that people will recognize that despite the underfunded campaign, or you can recognize that there is no escape from the money issue.

[dragonwriter]

So, you want literally every top decision maker in federal government to have a massive financial incentive to, even if honest, strive only to maximize GDP with no concern for distribution or other outcomes, and, if less honest, manipulate and protect the manipulation of GDP data.

That’s...a fantastically bad idea.

[souprock]

Compare with the alternative:

Literally every top decision maker in federal government has a massive financial incentive to accept affordable bribes. Honest people have a massive financial incentive to find work elsewhere.

That's our reality. It's not sane or safe to design a system of government around the assumption that a capable person will take a vow of poverty, even if "poverty" is only relative to a large company's CEO.

[dragonwriter]

> Compare with the alternative

That's not the alternative. You are constructing a false dichotomy.

The current pay structure and a GDP-indexed pay structure aren't the only alternatives.

But, Even ignoring the false dichotomy, this...

> Literally every top decision maker in federal government has a massive financial incentive to accept affordable bribes.

...is clearly better, since the intereses of bribers conflict, and it this becomes in the interests of politicians to discover, publicize, and punish others bribes, even if it means putting into place systems that also limit the bribes they themselves will be able to get away with. Whereas, with all government officials having aligned incentives for identical deceit, you make unified corruption more likely.

[souprock]

Unfortunately for that theory of conflicting bribes, much of the world is foreign. Bribes from foreign nations are mostly against the interest of country the politician is supposed to be running. Those bribes are incredibly cost-effective in the USA.

The currency of DC is blackmail. They will not discover, publicize, and punish other's bribes. They use the threat of that to keep each other in line. This is bipartisan collaboration.