Dvaut, could you explain how you didn't just describe quid pro quo

Then shouldn't every honest politician take speaking money as often as possible to at least dilute the bribing power of the monied elites?

The dirty politicians take the speech money 100% of the time. The honest politicians literally have zero effect by turning down $$$$. Yeah, it sure sucks that rich people are going to try to influence politics but that isn't changing.

I agree with most of this but it's ignoring the obvious market solution. Like any industry, if we want to attract the best in politics we need to create legitimate incentives.

Why not pay them A LOT more? This would reduce the need for graft, either while in office or after.

The president makes middle management money and I make more than a congressman. There is a huge misalignment between the power wielded by politicians and thier pay. This gap will be filled by special interest.

Publicallly fund elections and triple thier salary and you will largely eliminate all the concerns you mention above and it will be cheap to do so.

Finally, this is my right wing side talking, but I hate the idea that we judge this type of thing on the money amount. Would $100k be ok? How about $50k? $5k? Why are we setting some fake market rate?

What I explained is maybe a loose, informal version of a quid pro quo.

A formal quid pro quo would assume the health care industry is giving Obama $400k and you could point specifically to preferential treatment Obama specifically gave them: they give Obama money, he gave them this specific policy.

Instead of describing it as a quid pro quo, which I sincerely think misses the mark -- it's influence peddling, even if it's legal. The banking industry, health care, other big industries, the mega-wealthy, etc. signal that they will reward politicians at the end of their careers. You can assume they are doing this to send the message that politicians must act in ways favorable to them to get the cash in. In fact the legality of it is why it's sort of pernicious and *not* a quid pro quo; the firms that engage in it don't need anything specific. Just dump the money and jobs at the feet of people, executives, regulators, as they leave office and let the natural motivating factors of incentives do their work from there. The insistence that everyone prove a formal quid pro quo is a dodge and moving the goalposts; it asks everyone to ignore those very real incentives to prove an undue or illegal transaction that none of the actors engaged in, in fact, their behavior was to avoid precisely the illegal quid pro quo in favor of softer forms of rent seeking.

This just isn't true. Social psychology and behaviourial economics have shown time and again that what our peers do highly influences us. This is also true in politics. The vast majority of what is "right and wrong" in the political sphere is not codified in rules, but rather custom.

These customs change and shift. Let's not forget that while the rich influence politics in America it's not nearly as bad as some countries where corruption and bribery are the norm. They just tried to legalize it in Romania for christs sake. The only thing separating them from the US is custom.

These two sentences stand in stark contradiction of each other if we deploy the strategy you advocate. It casually assumes honest politicians have zero moral agency or ability to effect change and then declares a separate, unproven assumption that actually rests entirely on the debatable nature of the first.

http://www.politifact.com/oregon/sta...-80-health-ca/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation...are_Excellence

It's not about lifetime caps. Or how much money the US should spend on healthcare. It's about the futile waste of resources we spend on patient's with no quality of life. Weeks in the NICU or MICU where doctors acquiesce to the family's ridiculous demands (or doctors churn the patient through the medical industrial complex).

There is a finite amount of money the country can spend. Now you can argue einbert style that we can tax the rich more to give better healthcare to us all. Fine. That's a reasonable point. But that money could be better spent on roads, bridges, early preschool, increasing social security, job re-trainment. WE ALREADY SPEND ****ING DOUBLE ON HEALTHCARE THAN ANY OTHER COUNTRY. And it's not JUST because of insurance companies.

I am just beating the drum for people that don't work in health care to realize the outrageous amount of money that is wasted for no benefits to the patients (or society).

Just last night, we made several complicated baby IVs for this 23 week premature baby that has a grade IV brain bleed. Not survivable. No quality of life. But are we doing comfort care? No. Hell it's taken a week just to finally get a DNR order. Why was the baby even intubated at delivery? Because they tell the parents, well, let's just see how he does? Because the system just cannot let go. And system must try.

I see the heroin overdose patients. Patients that are my age. Down for "unknown" amount of time. Brought into the ER. Their brain is already gone. Yet we run the ACLS protocol on them, push some drugs, bring them "back". Put them into the ICU for a week, call them brain dead, pull the plug, and bill Medicaid or whoever.

And don't get me started on chemo. The most expensive drugs you can ever imagine. Extending patients lives by a few months with horrific side effects and destroying their bodies.

It isn't all unicorns and rainbows. Throwing more money at the health care industrial complex won't fix it.

1) I agree paying civil servants a lot of money is probably the best solution. It's probably not coincidence that tons of right-winger special interest money is dedicating to dismantling public investment in things they have little influence over , including in people and labor and compensation for government work of all kinds. Decrying things like public unions and the benefits politicians receive (health care, pensions, salary) is part and parcel of their strategy to ensure only the mega wealthy and the bribable have the wherewithal to seek office and powerful public positions, and that the quality of public service is low and to get people to seek private solutions with public dollars that they provide.

Give the President such an enormous pension that these questions become moot, but make the pension contingent on not taking private work, gigs, lobbying, etc.

2) I don't think we should judge this type of thing based on the money amount but simply point out that whatever the market rates are for public speaking fees, that they are astronomical to normal people is bad optics for good governance.

Ugg. Perhaps Ive had a stroke but I agree with every word of this post.

Here is a discussion of the issue

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/are-...radio-episode/

While I understand it's not 'virtue signaling' if you actually believe it, most self-styled progressives absolutely buy that theory.

Most voters, including those in the South, obviously DO strongly favor big government welfare state programs championed by FDR and Bernie.

What's changed between 1932 and today is the perception that the recipients of the government largesse would either include blacks or be unduly dolled out to blacks. 1932 southern whites casually assumed it wouldn't. 2017 southern whites are paranoid, angry and convinced blacks will be and are disproportionately favored.

After the Civil Rights Era came and the right-wing engaged in a huge, decades long propaganda project to convince whites that blacks would either stand to benefit unfairly or benefit at all, so with it went the public appetite for state welfare programs. Particularly in the south. At least in a race-neutral implementation.

The modern alt-right as epitomized by Bannon and Richard Spencer types almost absolutely transparent and honest that their vision for an idealized future is one where we institute lots of big government welfare programs for the herronvolk -- specifically whites, probably ideally channeled through white working men especially. Because they know it would be wildly popular among lots of people and that the opposition to welfare programs is only skin deep. Both literally and figuratively. They know the right-wing talking point game about competition and markets and free trade and private solutions are total kayfabe and most of the people voting for it really don't want it, and that they only vote for it because they think all that market orthodoxy policy stuff was really just a wink-wink nod-nod to punishing blacks and rewarding whites, and the marks for this scam are getting impatient if not outraged that in practice they aren't actually winning in this system like they thought. So Bannon and the rest of the alt-right want to cement a big electoral advantage by returning back to FDR type programs but just aimed directly at white guys. That is, they ARE trying to return back to FDR -- recognizing their inherently popularity in a democratic society -- but included in that is rolling back all of the gains in civil rights for racial minorities, women, etc. since then.

Those people are probably racist


And those same people don't care the current president is ACTUALLY doing that right now.

USA #18!!!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corr...ceptions_Index

The people I've seen saying that have all been leftists, not liberals. And they tweetstorm about Trump like every hour ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Since we're talking about health care

https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=H

Look at the total amount spent on lobbying.

It's time for some purity in politics.

Let's not forget, the US is no longer really a democracy.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sour...ZS7wjEVjQB95YQ

And the idea that qualified, quality people wouldn't want to be the President of the United States if there weren't a giant paycheck is frankly disgusting.

And how many awful top fortune 500 CEOs do there have to be before the market worshippers figure out that the big money and quality don't go hand in hand. Giant payoffs for CEOs is mostly corruption as well as powerful corporate executives and board members all look after their own interests.

The POTUS makes plenty of money. Big salaries don't stop people from wanting more, lol.

A person who is willing to do the bidding of the wealthy for a future payoff isn't a person who gives a **** about what their peers think of them.

You could have norms against taking speaking fees, but that doesn't stop the problem. There's always some way to pay off politicians with plausible deniability. I'd love for there to be norms against being greedy, but good luck with that.

This is like the people who said if Obama works with the other side then they will work with them. See how that turned out?

Pertains particularly to Brexit and UK elections, but the connections with Trump make it relevant here:

"A shadowy global operation involving big data, billionaire friends of Trump and the disparate forces of the Leave campaign influenced the result of the EU referendum."


Democracy hijacked

But there are norms against this and they mostly work.

My strategy was tongue in cheek, but taking/not taking speaking fees is not where honest politicians have the ability to effect change.

Do not pay politicians more, gmafb. Great way to bring more greed into public service. 150k or w/e these guys get is more than enough. You can put restrictions on the current pension, you don't have to pay them more.

1. the idea isn't that qualified, quality people wouldn't be President were it not for a big paycheck
nor is it
2. the idea that big money and quality go hand in hand

It's simply that, by having say a large pension for the President after retirement, we reduce the incentives for lobbying, paid-speaking-gigs, and other paid work after the gig is over. Certainly it can come with a prohibition of that kind of thing. So it might be hard to outlaw but it might be easier to make contingent on benefits. So instead of saying: elected officials can't do this and that after retirement, simply incentive that if they don't do it, we'll give you this money. Do it and lose your nice pension. Make the costs for potential bad actors (rent seeking, influence peddling firms) go higher and the ease for potential good actors (Presidents, officials, etc.) to say 'no.' Obviously from there very greedy people can rebuke the norms and go their own way, and then maybe we have to adjust or do something else.

That's not how markets work. Paying more would reduce graft,
not increase it.

I can only describe my reaction to paying them more to "reduce the need for graft" as pure revulsion.

Right, Bernie Madoff was innocent.