# What if politicians were required to live like their constituents? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [August 30, 2021, 4:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-politicians-were-required-to-live-like-their-constituents/949781 "2021-08-30T16:28:42Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Mnemnosyne](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mnemnosyne/32/3347_2.png) [@Mnemnosyne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mnemnosyne)\ **Post date:** [August 31, 2021, 1:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-politicians-were-required-to-live-like-their-constituents/949781/21 "2021-08-31T01:25:48Z")
> [@Great\_Antibob](#): > > You need a mechanism to avoid that. The assumption is people won’t move around much and/or it won’t turn into a haves/have nots situation where you really want to avoid bringing the mean/median income down out of fear of being kicked out. My hope would be that since **M** is based on the _largest,_ not the wealthiest constituency you have served, then larger constituencies can help mitigate these problems; a state can limit the excesses and problems of a single city/township within it, for instance. Plus there’s the fact that the richer constituents might not be inclined to live in such enclaves themselves. Consider that, in order for the mayor of BillionaireVille to be paid **M** yearly income, and have **M** net worth, the taxes of BillionaireVille have to be high enough to afford to pay that. > [@Chronos](#): > > Yet another complication: This creates an incentive for rapid turnover of office-holders. Once you’ve served in office, your pay for the rest of your life is set, so you might as well just retire and stop doing anything. > > And another: You say that it’s set by the largest polity that you’ve ever led. So let’s say that we have two governors. One institutes great policies, that cause her people to prosper, and her state to become the richest in the nation. The other institutes terrible policies, that destroy his state’s economy, leading them to become the poorest state in the nation. Which one of these two is going to run for President? This I do see as an issue; if you do well in a smaller constituency, bringing up the standard of living for that region, it might disincentivize you to move up to a larger constituency and maybe take a pay cut. We want the people who have actually improved their constituencies to move up and do the same for larger parts of the nation, but allowing someone to keep the pay from the richest constituency they’ve had seems problematic, since it gives them no real incentive to improve the larger level either. > [@Max\_S](#): > > And forget about ever asking for cash damages in court. Or doing business with any entity that knows you are or ever were a politician - they know they are effectively immune from civil prosecution and will thoroughly screw you and yours. Just quoting this bit, but replying to various of your points in general…yeah, several of those things sound like they might be problems. The question then would be whether there’s any way to alter the rules to maintain the idea, the purpose of the concept: making sure politicians and policymakers are compensated in a way that both keeps them living like their constituents rather than getting to live like a tiny percentage of the richest constituents, and also directly rewards them for improving the lives of the majority of their constituents rather than tailoring policies to special interests? I don’t think the insurance issue would be a problem (since the point of insurance is to make you whole, not make you rich when something bad happens); if their property is destroyed, they get to restore it back to the limit. And life insurance, since you’re no longer alive to collect, wouldn’t really come into it (at least not the way I see the details of the rules being written). The point is to prevent **the politician** from ever going beyond **M**. And while the politician may not personally benefit from civil prosecution, it doesn’t mean that judgements in their favor can’t happen; the money just doesn’t go to them. Yes, I suppose this does reduce the incentive to go through such prosecution, but if some company is intentionally screwing them because of that, I’ll wager they might feel motivated to do so anyway. And perhaps that could even be an additional damage to be added to the judgement, if in the court’s opinion the entity they’re suing willfully attempted to use that lack of incentive. Hell, allow court judgeents to bypass the ‘no choosing beneficiaries’ rule if this genuinely proves to become a problem; now lawyers have strong incentive to take up cases where people are trying to screw politicians/former politicians, since they can get more of the reward than usual. As for the health insurance thing, well…it would kind of be my hope that one way or another, they would be inclined to figure out a way to _provide_ better health coverage for their constituents, so that they themselves get it. You can bet if this was suddenly implemented right now by alien space bats, Congress would pass a platinum-plated medicare for all so fast it’d make your head spin. Generally speaking, isn’t one of the common complaints we have about politicians ‘they wouldn’t do this if they had to live under the same rules’? This idea’s core is: make them live under the same rules and eliminate ways they can avoid the issues that most people have. > [@doreen](#): > > Forget the impossibility of enforcing any of this. Look at who will be willing to take those jobs under those conditions - the median individual income in NYC is about $50K. and the median US individual income is about $36K. Would you want those jobs for that pay? Sure, there are lots of well-educated people who have jobs where they aren’t amazingly well-paid - but those jobs don’t tend to be the same sort of job as full-time political jobs. It’s one thing to work 40 hours a week for $50K and quite another to have to be available around the clock for days when there is some sort of emergency or not to ever have a real day off. This is something of a fair concern; I don’t mind lowering their pay tremendously, and I definitely want to incentivize them to improve things for everyone (as well as actually live in the conditions that the median citizen does, and have to deal with such issues to a significant degree) but I suppose it might go too far. Perhaps if there was some sort of multiplier incentive? Say, if during your time in office, or even during your time in office plus the following 2-4 years, to give time for effects that lag behind implementation, **M** went up by a certain percentage, you get 2x or even 3x of the increased **M**? ---
**Author:** ![TheGunIsMightierThanThePen](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thegunismightierthanthepen/32/2981_2.png) [@TheGunIsMightierThanThePen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TheGunIsMightierThanThePen)\ **Post date:** [August 31, 2021, 2:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-politicians-were-required-to-live-like-their-constituents/949781/22 "2021-08-31T02:41:50Z")
Regarding the OP - a noble idea in principle, but nigh unworkable in practice as others have already pointed out. Moreover, the people who have the power to enact this kind of change, are the same ones who have a vested interested in keeping the status quo. No senator or representative is going to willingly downsize their living standards and earning potential for the sake of their constituents. Let’s face it, human beings have a selfish streak at their core, no matter how much they try to hide it. > [@Mnemnosyne](#): > > - Can own no property beyond the **M** net worth of their constituents. > - Is provided with a salary/pension equal to the **M** yearly income of their constituents. > - May not save, invest, or otherwise grow their money; any owned property that appreciates in value takes up a correspondingly larger total of the **M** net worth of their constituents, and if it exceeds this, must be relinquished. I think this creates a huge incentive for politicians to bribe and/or offer large tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy to move to their districts. At the same time, they will try to pass laws that 1. burden their less well-off constituents, with the goal of driving these people out of the district 2. disenfranchise these same people, so that they can’t vote the politician out of office In short, it’ll be like the movie _Major League_, with the politicians playing the part of Rachel Phelps, and their districts being the Cleveland Indians. ---
**Author:** ![Max\_S](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/46a35a/32.png) [@Max\_S](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_S)\ **Post date:** [August 31, 2021, 4:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-politicians-were-required-to-live-like-their-constituents/949781/23 "2021-08-31T16:02:15Z")
> [@Mnemnosyne](#): > > I don’t think the insurance issue would be a problem (since the point of insurance is to make you whole, not make you rich when something bad happens); if their property is destroyed, they get to restore it back to the limit. In the case of crippling personal injury, health or auto insurance settlements can run into hundreds of thousands or even a million. The rationale is that the injury prevents you from working, therefore your projected future earnings are owed as restitution. This logic fails in the case of a politician whose future earnings are guaranteed by the government; restitution would logically be limited to the cost of healthcare and repairs. > [@Mnemnosyne](#): > > As for the health insurance thing, well…it would kind of be my hope that one way or another, they would be inclined to figure out a way to _provide_ better health coverage for their constituents, so that they themselves get it. The path of least resistance is not to run for office in the first place. > [@Mnemnosyne](#): > > You can bet if this was suddenly implemented right now by alien space bats, Congress would pass a platinum-plated medicare for all so fast it’d make your head spin. I think none of the current Congress-creatures will run for re-election under such circumstances. (Presumably your reforms will only affect people elected _after_ the reform takes place.) > [@Mnemnosyne](#): > > Generally speaking, isn’t one of the common complaints we have about politicians ‘they wouldn’t do this if they had to live under the same rules’? That is not a complaint I have made, personally. ~Max ---
**Author:** ![Delayed\_Reflex](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/delayed_reflex/32/3172_2.png) [@Delayed\_Reflex](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Delayed_Reflex)\ **Post date:** [August 31, 2021, 6:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-politicians-were-required-to-live-like-their-constituents/949781/24 "2021-08-31T18:51:33Z")
> [@Oredigger77](#): > > I think the law degree portion of this conversation is misleading the average person in the US doesn’t have a college degree so we’d be looking at locking in our politicians somewhere below the college graduate level let alone the grad school level. The median income in Colorado is just under $36k/year that is [3,000 less than the average 10 year salary of graduates from the worst college in the state](https://www.collegesimply.com/colleges/colorado/fort-lewis-college/salaries/). > > This plan would either get us politicians who are average high school students, people without ambition who realize if they work for a year or two they never have to work again, or “religious” wackjobs who treat becoming a politician like becoming a priest. > > I’d rather pay our politicians a salary at the 99.9 percentile level so we can outcompete any other job they may want. I agree (well not necessarily with the pay politicians at the 99.9th percentile part) - I think the result of this is that it would greatly reduce the pool of people who would be willing to become politicians, especially competent people who could make a decent living in a regular job. I think it essentially would put being a politician on the same level as being a low-level worker at a non-profit organization - only people who are solely interested in benefitting society, to their own personal detriment, would be interested in becoming a politician. Governments would more closely resemble volunteer-run organizations - even non-profits tend of have some higher paid executives, which wouldn’t be possible with this proposal. I agree with all of the posters that it creates a huge incentive to be a one-term politician. I mean, I like the underlying sentiment, but it seems like a “wouldn’t it be nice” sort of thing than anything that’s practically achievable. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-politicians-were-required-to-live-like-their-constituents/949781.md?page=1)