The relatively low salaries compared to the huge amounts of power is almost begging for insider trading, influence peddling, etc.
> The salary of a Congress member varies based on the job title of the congressman or senator. Most senators, representatives, delegates and the resident commissioner from Puerto Rico make a salary of $174,000 per year.
Then again, some people have near insatiable greed and even at a $1M/year salary, some would be looking for ways to further boost their income at the boundaries of ethics, or beyond.
thank you for this extremely important correction. I was reading the comments instead of the article and wondering in the back of my mind how the Fed even had jurisdiction over Congress.
sure hope it remains visible in the comment hierarchy.
I went to the article; the UI is horribly broken, and prevented me reading past the first para (by continuously reloading); but I got that it was about their own staff.
Perhaps someone will start a “Speaker of the House” index fund which the officers from the Federal Reserve can buy, since they won’t be able to buy individual stocks.
... If you want to help, you must throw all of your startup equity away.
... No, you may not co-brand with that company (which is not complicit with your agenda).
... Besides, I'm not even eligible for duty: you can't hire me.
... Maybe I could be more helpful from competitive private industry.
... How can a government hire prima donna talent like Iron Man?
... Is it criminal to start a solvent, sustainable business to solve government problems, for that one customer?
... Which operations can a government - operating with or without competition - solve most energy-efficiently and thus cost-effectively? Looks like single-payer healthcare and IDK what else?
> "NIST Special Publication 800-181 revision 1, the Workforce Framework for Cybersecurity (NICE Framework), provides a set of building blocks for describing the tasks, knowledge, and skills that are needed to perform cybersecurity work performed by individuals and teams. Through these building blocks, the NICE Framework enables organizations to develop their workforces to perform cybersecurity work, and it helps learners to explore cybersecurity work and to engage in appropriate learning activities to develop their knowledge and skills.
> Peering, Clearing and Settling;
The Interledger network is a graph of nodes (connectors) that have peered with one another by establishing a means of exchanging ILP packets and a means of paying one another for the successful forwarding and delivery of the packets.
Fed or no, wouldn't you think there'd be money in solving for the https://performance.gov Goals ( https://www.usaspending.gov/ ) and the #GlobalGoals (UN Sustainable Development Goals) -aligned GRI Corporate Sustainability Report? #CSR #ESG #SustyReporting
This is an example of the "you can pay people not to be corrupt" argument. It relies on people who are both willing to be corrupt, and happy to leave money on the table.
It's exactly the same argument as paying for media not to include advertisements.
What we should do is stop filtering for trash by having jobs that pay $174K require multi-million dollar application fees (i.e. a campaign.) That's exactly how you would hire for a job if you wanted to make sure that the primary purpose of having that job was personal enrichment. We talk about being saddled with college debt; we can see the results of being saddled with campaign debt.
How does that happen when your government is run by two tiny private clubs fueled by exactly that sort of personal ambition? It doesn't. Getting a handle on corruption in the US is going to take a lot more than a few tiny adjustments. Especially when the people responsible for making those adjustments would be the corrupt class we would be claiming to fix.
Expecting Congress to fix itself when Congress is composed of the people who were good at this process is bizarre. The best a centrist can do is wait for the courts to fix it.
edit: The court broke it more with Citizens United. It simply doesn't believe that self-enrichment from politics is bad in and of itself. It believes that part of democracy is that the elected person has a mandate to do what they think is best, within the rule of law, and helpfully abolishes any laws or norms that would prevent bribery.
This is not a US only problem, virtually any country is run by a couple of political parties and their friends and they can do pretty much anything with little repercussions.
I agree better pay is not the answer. The only reasonable alternative is to reduce their powers (especially reducing the amount of money they can spend and the laws they can impose on people) and spread them to local entities.
Decentralisation is the only antidote to government corruption and waste.
> This is not a US only problem, virtually any country is run by a couple of political parties and their friends and they can do pretty much anything with little repercussions.
Not the parent, but Singapore comes to mind as a great example of one party having their fingers everywhere, including the supposedly-apartisan civil service, the trade unions, the political grassroots organisations, and most of the mainstream media organisations.
Singapore's two sovereign wealth funds invest in a massive number of local and foreign companies, and often install people they're grooming (usually ex-military) in fancy positions to boost their resumes [1].
Quite a few Members of Parliament hold quite a few directorships in supposedly private companies [2], but it's all fine and dandy as long as the affiliations are declared.
What if we substantially raised salaries — let's say to $100m/yr for the president, and lower but proportional amounts for all other major officials at the federal level — while on the other hand treating corruption-related crimes for those officials as tantamount to light treason?
(Just a thought experiment, not something I'm seriously proposing.)
No he's right. The courts will fix this. After the people "come up with a solution" that doesn't involve going through the courts. The courts hate that.
Yet they get randomly replaced every few years. Ask Hilary Clinton how mucb she managed to raise. That randomness keeps a potential American Xi or Putin on their toes.
Your last sentence is really the key thesis. This isn't an argument to pay representatives (whether that be Congressional or at monetary policy orgs) more, but to have robust controls to better detect and action corruption. Greed knows no bounds (see: corrupt billionaires and Dark Triad personality traits [1]) and humans will be humans, so strong systems must be designed and implemented to defend against improper behavior.
Alternatively - maybe it's not so great that government is so big and central and has so much power. Politicians are gonna find ways to corrupt that power no matter what.
The same could be said for megacorps.
Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world. China and Chinese SOEs are going to be big and powerful and centralized for the foreseeable future no matter what - and if we don't have anything to oppose them - that doesn't seem great either.
Deliberately getting rid of "big government" just leads to even more unaccountable megacorps filling the void. That's been the lesson of America for the past 40-50 years.
If you want any chance of competing on the global stage in the 3rd millennium, the solution is to embrace big government and do it right. It is possible to implement anti-corruption mechanisms. Like any security measure, they will never be infallible, but they will certainly increase the friction required to be corrupt.
Otherwise, your country will be a sickly host to parasitic & transnational megacorps. Like America and many smaller countries today.
Meh. It’s a lot easier to hold big mega corps to account with small government than it is to hold big government to account by any means whatsoever.
Besides, in practice big government rather prefers doing business with a few big companies and national labor unions who will pay for the politicians’ campaigns and talk up their agenda — applying discretionary enforcement to hobble enemies, and big-time regulation can be a major barrier to entry that reduces competition for your friends. Perhaps you don’t believe me? For a trivial example in recent memory about how government is happy to oppress its enemies by “holding them to account”, consider Operation Chokepoint.
It’s a valid concern, mind you! I’m just skeptical of the remedy. You need a hell of a lot of faith in the policies of the next several decades to think this is a good idea. I don’t.
Private businesses are the only thing that kept America relevant. If it wasn't for Big Tech, the USA would be poorer and much less relevant.
The centralised American army, with its huge spend, doesn't have much to show for.
I dislike megacorps as well: I would prefer to have smaller businesses so that the power would be more spread across society.
Incidentally the government and their regulations are often what helps monopolies to solidify and become unbeatable. Maybe if you get rid of all government and not only of "big government" you will have less corruption and mega corporations as well.
People who live in normal nations laugh at both the people subject to the China authoritarian monstrosity and the people subject to the USA authoritarian monstrosity. Building and subjecting oneself to such a giant voracious parasitic automaton is obvious folly. They don't laugh too loudly, however, because they've read The Jakarta Method. China is actually less of a threat (except to close neighbors like Vietnam) because they have millennia of tradition and scholarship encouraging them not to care too much what barbarians say.
>because they have millennia of tradition and scholarship encouraging them not to care too much what barbarians say.
Except if the barbarians talk about Taiwan (see Jon Cena) or Uygars. China has cowed even the NBA and western movie companies from going near those subjects.
I would draw a distinction between "pay conservative factions in the Indonesian military to kill a million communists, communist sympathizers, and random unaffiliated villagers" [0] and "don't do business with entertainment firms whose biggest stars say things you don't like". Others might not draw such a distinction.
Also, this Uighur thing is blown totally out of proportion. [1][2] I'm not suggesting anyone believe Chinese officials or media. I only suggest we view USA officials and media with a modicum of skepticism.
While I think all western countries can easily be considered authoritarian countries, given most of them demand half of the profits of everyone doing anything productive on their land, you're terribly deluded if you think they rank anything close to what China is.
China has concentration camps, kill businesses with a whip of the hand and apparently have half of the world (probably including your government) on their payroll.
That link appears to describe a public discussion about Taiwan's membership status with respect to WHO?
I have no doubt that many in my government are on China's payroll, especially at the state and local levels. USA government is not a monolith, however, and MIC still pays enough people to keep the whole "security" hoax going.
Living in DC on 174k/yr with a family and a spouse whose job prospects are limited by your profession is a tough order.
You are effectively demanding that policy makers be self sufficient, which selects for those policy makers most likely to benefit financially from policy decisions.
Unfortunately, Congress people must live in the districts they represent. And while $174k is quite decent even in SF, this person will have a standard of living below even what a software engineer with no management responsibilities is going to have.
Why would an ambitious person run for office if the pay is low? We’ve already tried this experiment with government industries like teaching, and then we wonder why American educational policy is loosing global competitiveness.
> Why would an ambitious person run for office if the pay is low?
Power. Exposure. Experience and connections that are useful in highly-paid lobbying and other political influence positions. Serving their own direct, or others who will be thankful, financial interests in ways that will generate orders of magnitude more returns than the direct pay of the position. Etc.
Perhaps congressional pay should be determined by cost of living then. Or maybe each state should set and fund compensation for their delegation (including aids). It’s at the point where random county supervisors in CA cam make more than a congressperson.
Ok, but there’s no way the speaker from California could afford a decent home in Alexandria, VA and a nice home in SF on that kind of salary. It’s quite likely these congressmen are already wealthy.
I'd rather see Congressional salaries indexed to household incomes. While sure, $174K might be nominal in the private professional world, it's still 3x average US household income. They have health insurance and pensions. Better gig than the vast majority of their voting constituents. It might give them some humility and understanding of the plight of those constituents if they were remunerated similarly.
If one believes that legislators should be drawn from a pool of competent individuals who have options in private industry, you'd look at executive salaries in industry instead of the average US household.
Singapore indexes its government pay to that of the private industry for this reason, but they're also ruthlessly meritocratic and some might say, elitist. Yet also very effective. The two seem related to me, but it might not mesh well with American values.
Well, there's a solution for the housing thing too: dormitories or a flat housing allowance. These folks are intended to maintain a life in their constituencies, therefore their homes in WA DC should be treated as transient. Thus, a housing allowance similar to what other Federal employees encounter, and/or a Congressional dormitory, to me sounds like a perfectly acceptable solution. This is a job intended to be for the good of the American people, not a stepping stone to further wealth as it's been treated.
It depends what you mean, but I think you underestimate people. We all contain virtue and greed, and have the free will to choose which we will favor.
Of course, it's more complicated than that anyway: What happens is that some kinds of corruption become normalized and thus people don't feel they are violating ethics, and some corruption, though objectively no worse, is not normalized and is responded to with outrage.
I agree that a culture of non-corruption needs to be created, and that culture flows down from the top. Caltech did a good job of that with the Honor System. The Tour de France did a miserable job, as competitors feel they have to cheat in order to have a chance.
It's still not a good idea to tempt people too much, and any system should be set up to not be too tempting.
Also think about the thing they’re doing to compromise their ethics: they’re buying stocks with an ‘unfair’ advantage. This isn’t exactly sending kids to war for kickbacks.
If Jerome Powell was greedy he would simply get a job in the private sector.
Anyone who is capable of getting the job as Fed Chairman will have no problem making a lot, easily and legally.
Believe it or not, some people go into public service with the desire to serve the public. Sometimes there are people who have already achieved tremendous financial success.
>"Believe it or not, some people go into public service with the desire to serve the public."
If under "public" you mean riches who buy those "public servants" in bulk using legalized bribes and cushy corporate jobs after terms then I would agree.
I am sure there are few good exceptions but they do not paint the whole picture.
Yeah, the other day this really hit home for me. I don't know why I hadn't previously thought about it in such clear terms. Being a congressperson has to be one of the most morally hazardous occupations in the world. I mean, you have more direct control over how our entire society works than almost anyone else. So you become the perfect target for bribery and gain access to countless levers that you could pull in your own favor or the favor of your friends. I suppose this all goes without saying but for some reason it only recently dawned on me just how much this is true. And the position must select for people who are the most willing to exploit all those opportunities. Not sure how to really solve for it. Maybe getting paid more would help but I don't know.
Singapore does a good job of matching public servant pay to private sector pay for that exact reason. They go so far as to index government pay scales to private sector pay.
The entire intent is to attract very talented people that want to do a good job. Having access to the levers of power is much less of an incentive as a (theoretical) result.
Yeah, that all seems like a great idea. I'm sure Singapore has its issues, but sometimes I think it's funny how logically other countries seem to approach their problems. It's almost as though they actually want to solve them. In the mean time, in the US, we can't have nice things because reasons. It's sort of like how Japan has toilets with warmed seats. In the US, we don't have that because...honestly I have no idea; it's a great idea that we're simply missing out on.
P.S. To be fair, I think part of the reason Japan has this is that a lot of homes lack house-wide heating systems. They have things like kotatsus (heated tables) or space heaters. So it actually gets really cold in the winter. Having a warm toilet seat then seems like more of a necessity. But still...can't we just have warm toilet seats?
I think there is an inevitable trade off between getting stuff done in a corrupt way, and not being corrupt but being unable to get stuff done.
And I would argue that historically you see this. Saudi Arabia modernized with a lot of corruption. The US modernized with a lot of corruption -- the period of American industrialization and modernization was called "The Gilded Age". Now there are huge bureaucratic processes, checks and balances, all sorts of oversight -- and it's extremely hard to get anything done.
I've had one installed in my house for years, and am 100% going to install one wherever I live in the future. The hygiene and comfort improvements are phenomenal.
How about just actually making the bad stuff illegal and actually investigating and prosecuting it? Note that we’re discussing known bad things that congresspeople are doing.
Wow, so that actually deters me from libertarian ideals. It sounds like your logic is something like the following:
Government is corruptible, so we should have small/weak governments.
But, a small gov. doesn't solve the root problem, it just make it easier to corrupt what little power is left. Isn't the real solution to have some group responsible for providing oversight and enforcement to elected officials?
In my opinion small government doesn't make sense because that isn't even a good target to begin with. An effective government may be small or big. The dogmatic insistence on big or small governments often bought by a less effective government which just reinforces existing prejudices.
Those who advocate for small governments tend to remove the best parts first because they are "optional". A lot of tax cuts are financed by cutting government investments which ultimately result in less overall investment in the economy.
> Isn't the real solution to have some group responsible for providing oversight and enforcement to elected officials?
Most US citizens seem to consider their government to be a "Democracy", that responsibility/authority should therefore naturally fall on the whole of their citizens.
Most US citizens are told and taught we live in a democracy, but our systems were designed as a republic.
Saying that it is the citizens fault for our politicians corruption is the same flavor as saying it is citizen’s faults for global warming because we use plastic and drive cars.
just to expand, indeed their salaries are relative average. But, their benefits package both during and after tenure is generous.
Their package include health & life insurance outside the general public market, social security, FERS, CSRS, personnel & office and mail allowances, office space, furniture, office equipment, food, laundry, and much more.
It will definitely not make them millionaires, but will allow them to live an upper echelon life; compared to some of us, even luxurious life.
Listen, I know we're all senior developers working at a FAANG, making between $300k-500k/year in total compensation, but $160k/yr is a giant pile of money for many, many Americans. The fact that it's $160k + health insurance plan that qualifies as "really fucking good" makes that $160k far more than the already-above-average Joe's 160k.
I didn't realize GP was using that number too make it sound low. At first I thought the 175k number was an attempt to show how much better paid that position is compared to the rest. The fact that the average position in the source is just under 200k/year and people are reading it as a bad package seems incredibly out of touch.
I'm a geek working at a nontechnical nonprofit, outside the US, and I don't even have a 6-figure annual salary. And yet, I was reading a book about capitalism and democracy in my current country, and I realized that my salary, which is decent compared to many Americans, puts me in the top 20% of earners here.
So I agree wholeheartedly: $160k is a large salary for the vast majority of the world, and I would guess that its large for many of HackerNews' global readers.
Don't forget that all Congress members and former members get a fully vested pension after only 5 years in Congress, which can be collected at age 62, or even lower ages for longer time served.
However, the Fed is distinct from Congress. Not sure if the Fed also participates in FERS.
> Don’t forget that all Congress members and former members get a fully vested pension after only 5 years in Congress
Fully vested, but at 1.0% of the top 3 years salary per year of service. So, sure, at 5 years of service @ 174K per year, they could draw pension at 62 – but that pension would only be $8,700/year.
The Federal Reserve doesn’t have the power to regulate members of congress AFAIK. This is specifically them regulating people that work for the Federal Reserve
I feel the same thing can apply to cops too. I'm all for paying people in these positions market rate or even slightly above. That has to be coupled with effective oversight and higher penalties which are actually enforced. We need to stop treating white collar crime lighter than blue collar crime.
Sometimes I feel like congress and representatives should make the minimum wage of the area they represent. Might encourage them to actually improve things for the people.
It's a good way to only get the rich to become federal politicians.
Congress gets paid like 174k a year. Sure, it's a lot of money compared to the US median, but anyone who can get elected to Congress can earn that elsewhere.
For tech, 174k isn't even a big salary; we're talking an industry where a starting SE salary at a FAANG is around there. That's not a huge paycheck for a 24/7 job like federal politics.
170k is already a functional equivalent of the minimum wage, relative to the power they yield.
You're describing what we already have.
The argument being made is that if you're going to pay people a low wage, they'll just increase it by trading some of the power they yield in exchange for money for themselves, which is the problem we're trying to solve for :)
That’s very dangerous. If they make that much money they will have even less understanding of how the average citizen lives. That’s already a big problem. I wouldn’t want to make it worse.
It will increase the pool of individuals competing for the job, and even encourage new political parties.
In fact, that might be the reason that politicians are paid so poorly now: they can just be drawn from the pool of political insiders and parachuted into districts.
Like another poster said, political term limits of 10 years in combination with this seems reasonable.
Honestly, we should give the Federal Reserve performance-based pay. Elon Musk has literally been paid billions for Tesla's phenomenal stock outperformance, why shouldn't we pay the Fed Chairs tens of millions for sustained real GDP growth above 4% balanced with low wealth inequality, low inflation, and low unemployment? They have the most important job in America and they should be paid like it if they do well
Would certainly be better but I would say ten years is not a crazy long time when it comes to borrowing decisions that often have 30 years timetables.
Also doesn't capture in the the unequalness of gains. Which is better - the fed doing something that has 90% chance of huge gains or a 10% chance of catastrophic economy shattering loss? Or an 80% chance of huge gains and a 20% chance of gains netting 0? The first is much more desirable if maximizing a bonus and could be tempting - but I dont think we want that risk.
> The salary of a Congress member varies based on the job title of the congressman or senator. Most senators, representatives, delegates and the resident commissioner from Puerto Rico make a salary of $174,000 per year.
https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/pay-salary/congressman-...
Then again, some people have near insatiable greed and even at a $1M/year salary, some would be looking for ways to further boost their income at the boundaries of ethics, or beyond.