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.

[–] michaelmrose@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago (2 children)

We can tie it to the median wage without fixating on that exact multiplier they can also consider ways to raise the median wage...

[–] finitebanjo@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago

Yeah I agree it's a good idea, I also agree that it isn't competitive.

[–] Enkrod@feddit.org -2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Fastest way to raise the median wage is to kick out the poor and stop all social housing projects, turn everything expensive and boooom, median wage goes up. I think that's a perverse incentive and is actually hurting representatives that take good care of poor people, who, because of that, move to the district. It's also a glaring loophole.

No if we're gone tie pay to performance, we need better tools to evaluate performance.

[–] michaelmrose@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

The poor overwhelmingly do things that need to be done and often these physical tasks unlike office jobs are the least automatable. Few people by percentage live in any sort of social housing and there is no short term way to toss every poor person onto the street while not also ruining most of the rich people.

This is really an imaginary problem.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

[–] calcopiritus@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

If they are so skilled, they should be able to raise the median wage in their district. Thus increasing their own wage.

[–] finitebanjo@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

Yes they could but they can also just work a job that actually pays well without waiting for a district wide socioeconomic restructuring because as people tried to explain to you already that pay isn't competitive.

In fact, even if the Median Wage increased vastly they would STILL make more money as a lawyer because they would have more clients willing to pay more.