That doesn’t seem a remotely likely reason. No one is going to recognize most congressmen and I’m rather confident Ryan isn’t sleeping in his office.
Largely because the OP came back and raised that point in post #9.
Yep. If you provide a frat house, you get frat boys. If you want doctors and lawyers, you need to pay a salary that will allow doctors and lawyers to rent a second home without having to take kickbacks.
I am not advocating for larger congressional salaries. I’m just point out the disconnect between trying to get people like Lee Iacoca and expecting him to take a salary reduction without being tempted to accept kickbacks. There’s many ways we could address this problem. One way would be to change our minds about what kind of people we want for congress and start voting for blue collar workers instead. People who make $39K per year would be thrilled to get $174K and wouldn’t be so tempted to take revolving door jobs from lobbyists. But how do you persuade the voters to change their minds about what kind of person they want to vote for?
My suggestion is that we need to completely change the way we choose our representatives. For example, we could make public office random, like jury duty. For jury duty, they typically start with 60 or 70 people and then narrow it down to 12 jurors plus a few alternates. We could do the same thing with congress. Randomly select 1,500 citizens over the age of 30 and then start weeding out the ones who are mentally ill or those who beg to be excused because of hardship, et cetera. Get it down to about 600 viable candidates that way. Then randomly pick 300 out of that group and say “Congratulations, you’re going to be congress for the next two years and we’ll pay you $174K each”. One year later, when those 300 people have all gotten to know each other pretty well, they vote among themselves to choose which of them will be president. When the second year is up, thank everyone and send them home, except for the president who stays on for just one more year. Nobody runs for reelection. There is no reelection.
Another idea that I had is that we need to get back closer to how things worked when our country was founded. The average person did not vote for president. The president was chosen by the state legislators. And the state legislators were chosen by the voters, who themselves were a small fraction of the entire population. The point is that each state legislator was voted on by just a thousand or so voters, meaning they could get to know every single person in their district personally. The legislators all knew each other as well. And since there were only a few hundred state legislators, it was feasible for every single one of them to meet the presidential candidates personally. The average citizen never met the president and never voted for president. But they knew someone personally who voted for someone who personally knew the president. We could go back to that type of system. The problem is that our population is too large and we have too many states and counties now; there’s no way the presidential candidates could meet every single state legislator and know them on a personal level. We would need a system with 4 tiers instead of 3. Voters in each district chooses a rep from among themselves. The reps in each congressional district get together and personally meet all the candidates for congress, then the reps vote to choose the member of congress. Then all the MOC’s meet in DC and personally get to know all the presidential candidates and they are the ones who vote for president. That way, every single voter personally knows a rep who personally knows the MOC who personally knows the president.
There are plenty more ideas. The big picture is that our current system produces slick politicians who look nice on television but they get kickbacks through the revolving door. It’s not because there’s a flaw in human nature. It’s not because we vote for the wrong political party. It’s because the system tends to produce people who fit into the system. If you want different types of people, you have to change the system itself.
I agree with you that it’s not a remotely likely reason, but your confidence about Ryan is misplaced. See the article linked in the OP.
Huh, don’t know how I missed that. But if anything this proves the paltry salary has nothing to do with it as well.
I don’t see how that follows. 1) Ryan started doing it before he became Speaker, and 2) even if doesn’t in the case of Ryan (and he gave other justifications in that article) it might in the case of other people.
Why do you think that they wouldn’t? Most of the people that would be in living in the buildings would be fairly connected to the govt, whether they are a bureaucracy, a lobbyist, or a staffer of some sort. Even the people that are living there that are just part of the general services would still be more aware of the people who wield the levers of power. It’s not as if they have secret identities or anything.
I mean, I could only recognize a couple few dozen congresscritters if I happened to encounter them in public, but if I had a high chance of encountering them, their pictures are only a google away. Not to mention gossip. I may not have recognized Ron Estes when I passed him in the hallway, but my neighbor did, and she tells me all about him.
You think Ryan was poor before he got his Speaker raise?
I don’t know. But there’s no reason to think he was any richer than any other congressman. (Probably less than average, since he’s not one of these guys who made a fortune in the private sector before running for Congress.)
Remind them that the people that are in office are complaining that their salaries are too small, even though they are much bigger than the vast majority of their constituents.
I’ve always been a fan of a random panel for primaries, but the voters need to choose. Generating the candidates that will be running should be more like a jury pool than a popularity contest, though, I agree.
He was relatively low on the income list when he entered congress (not poor at all but not rich). Since then his wife’s parents died and they inherited millions. Supposedly he is right atop the bell curve when it comes to the wealth of those in congress with somewhere around $5 million to his household…give or take.
At the end of the day, it seems most likely that Representatives living rent free in their office is entirely a political demonstration and this letter is about some other Reps getting a little sick of it.
Why is it a demonstration (political or otherwise)? They don’t seem to advertise that they do this (or if they do I never hear of it). I also don’t see how constituents would get mad that their congresscritter had a studio or 1 bedroom apartment in DC. I would think that is a default expectation.