* They don’t actually write those books, do they? Aren’t they all ghostwritten by hired writers? Their speeches are all written for them and consultants decide what their opinions are supposed to be. Most of our politicians are like Hollywood actors auditioning for a role. It’s hard to tell what the real person is like behind the role they’re playing.
* The base pay of a US Congressman is $174,000, plus a fully paid benefit plan. They also receive about 1.3 million dollars for office expenses. They get wined and dined by rich lobbyists, their family members are given cushy, high paid jobs and they’re usually guaranteed a high paying job for themselves if they decide to give up their office. The line of people willing to spend enormous sums of money to get into office shows they make more than enough. Who was the last Senator or Congressman who ran for office because he actually believed in something. If they do care about an issue, that changes the day they win.
In our corrupt system, we should probably force politicians to pay for their seats.
* The job itself has become less accessible or amenable to people with no education or other types of education and backgrounds. Take a look at the US Constitution and compare it to the foot high stack of papers that is a tax code or a healthcare program, and you’ll notice the trend. Legal training becomes an obvious asset to the work when the legislation is, by rational political necessity (special interests, obfuscation, given and take), so large that you don’t even have time to read it before passing it. I read that a lot of legislation is simply written by lobbyists then argued over by Congressmen in straight political terms, like soccer amateurs discussing their teams with no moneyball statistics behind them. Then the legislation passes, in one way or another, modified to the broad strokes agreed upon, and that’s when the various industries and the Congressmen learn what everything inside the piece of legislation is or does or means in the short and long term. With so little actual input or time for even Congressional aides to read the thing, having a legal education helps you to speed read it better or get the gist. I think the non-lawyers in Congress are mostly the self-taught ideologues, like the father-son doctor duo.
Of course, this kind of legal occultism is by design, as advanced by the most powerful professional guild in existence in almost every country, that of lawyers. It cements both their role in Congress, their role in the Congressional apparatus, in drafting legislation, in being the muscle and the worker ants of special interests, their meat and potatoes after (litigation opportunities) and so on.
My significant other is a lawyer and I’m constantly amazed by how much the deck is stacked by the Barr Association to not only limit the influx of new lawyers and keep prices high, but to obtain preferential treatment. For instance, Romania has a universal pay-as-you-go public pension system, where people’s current payments are immediately transferred to existing retirees and pensions are set, by law, at a level that, in theory, fits past contributions in real terms, but fiddles with it to subsidize poorer retirees and people who performed dangerous or debilitating labor (factory, mines etc). Being a poorer country, the pensions are not that great and sob stories abound, as well as fear for the future, as the population ages and decreases rapidly (migration and low birth rate) while the population of subsidized and criminal zero marginal product “workers” from the Indian subcontinent balloons.
Anyway, imagine that, in all of this, the lawyers, who are the best paid professionals in society, exceeding bank workers as an average (who have lots of low paid grunts) and maybe comparable only to certain IT workers (fiscally subsidized by the State for strategic reasons), have their own separate pension fund just for themselves into which they pay their huge contributions, not burdened by any paupers and the socially necessary but financially disadvantaged classes (teachers, nurses, public doctors). It’s like separating a pot of health insurance money and administering it in two – one for the elders and one for the youngsters. It obviously won’t work without transfers, no matter how much the companies would like it to.
PS Notice how the Chinese mostly had engineers as Politburo members and legislators and only in the new generation of leadership an economist and a lawyer made their way to the top. PM Li Keqiang being an economist I think.
* Lee Kuan Yew paid Singapore officials extremely well so they wouldn’t be tempted to take bribes.
* The ‘book deals’ are what troubles me. Former Speaker Jim Wright threw together a bunch of old speeches and called it “Reflections of A Public Man”. Labor Unions and others with business they needed the Speakers help with could buy a few hundred copies of this magnificent tome as a round about bribe.
Wright was ridiculed for this but he didn’t have to return the money. Clinton and The Rodhamster refined this scheme when they got their multimillion dollar ‘advances’ from Simon and Shuster and it was a perfectly legal way for corporate money to be delivered to a sitting politician but at least it was private money.
Obama has gone a step further with his book deals. As noted, his efforts as a wordsmith had been completed years before he became a well known public figure so his out of print books got some sales as reporters and political interests needed to do some research on a man with no public past. I suppose that might have generated some modest legitimate sales of the books but nothing that would make you millions. Obama is making his book money from the taxpayer. You can bet every public school library in America has copies of his books. So lucrative is this little scheme anyone contemplating running for the presidency would be a fool not to have published a book in the off chance they win. Why wait until you are out of office to cash in when you can start getting your book royalties the day after the election!
* Rubio’s financial struggles were due to his profligate spending habits and indicative of a guy with middling IQ and low future time orientation. Getting involved in politics did not hurt his earning potential. This is a guy who went to clown colleges before finally being able to transfer in to UF and then graduating middle of the pack from University of Miami Law which is itself a middle of the pack law school. Florida legislators get paid about $30 grand a year but real gelt is in the private law work. Legislating is part time business in Florida and everybody with a law degree draws a separate pay check from whatever firm they work for and being a state legislator vastly increases your value to any potential employer. Rubio was making about $70 grand before he got elected, which is about what you would have expected given his age and educational background. Within just four years of being a legislator, that amount jumped to $270,000. Once he was elected Speaker, it jumped to over $300,000 a year.
Nobody is going to shed a tear for a politician struggling to get by on $300,000 a year. Rubio is “poor” because took out $900,000 in home mortgage debt (on top of over $100,000 in student loans that were still outstanding!), bought an $80,000 boat, and lived a life style far beyond what his extremely healthy salary could afford. He’s the NBA point guard/Rap Star of GOP Presidential candidates. He was making Paul/Walker type money, but he wanted to live the life of a Bush.
