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.
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.
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.
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?