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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.
“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.
Lot of defeatism in the comments. You know who didn’t plan on defeat? The project 2025 assholes. Fight! Fight fire with fire!! Fuck anyone that doesn’t get on board. Project 2028, general strike, death to fascism!!
Raising minimum wage won’t do shit, just cause more inflation. Deal with the real problem, cap the highest paid employee at 10x the lowest paid employee. CEO wants a million dollar salary, has to pay the grunts 100k first.
Hmm that ain’t bad
Except no one will bother voting for this because the dems are just as bad because they’re not giving away free unicorns or something /s
Dems aren’t for any of that, let alone all of it.
I’m thinking more that no one will vote for the dems, because the dems don’t actually try to get any of this through?
If they wanted ANY of this through, they could have done so multiple times the past 10, 20, 50 years, but no. The dems do not want to accomplish this list. It is NOT part of the democrat policies.
Shouldn’t that be “Project 2029”? That’s when a new president would take office.
Humans like even numbers more, if it’s a campaigning tool you want to maximize likeability
I would love to see unrealized gains used as collateral taxed.
I’ve always thought it was the fairest way to stop them from using/enjoying/benefiting from their wealth without paying taxes, without having to just outright tax unrealized gains which is pretty unfair to me.
You could optionally start it at a certain wealth level so as to not burden the working class with the extra complicated taxes it would cause, and the wealthy at that point would be able to afford the extra work on the taxes.
I sadly don’t think it will ever happen in our life times =(
I say just tax all churches, not just the big ones.
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.
Ranked choice is an improvement, but ending FPTP is better. There are other proportional representation systems that are likely to outperform ranked choice, let’s not lock in on that specific alternative.
Too bad we’ll never have a benevolent tyrant who rams these things through. It’s always evil that does things that way.
Make the government fearful of the people.
Make the government fearful of the people.
Isn’t that what the NRA claims the 2nd ammendment is all about?
The French invented the perfect device.
If we can actually get back in power after they rig or cancel elections, yes!
Capping congressional salary motivates corruption.
Yeah was going to say the same. Also if it’s proportional to the wealth of the constituents, don’t the richer districts attract more talent?
Not necessarily, look at all the corruption the billionaires do
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.
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.
