What, other than actually running for office? Every four years there’s a rumor that some fabulously wealthy person or other will run for president - Trump, Bloomberg, etc. Usually they don’t bother because it’s a lot of work for less pay than they are accustomed to. A lot of wealthy people may lack common sense, but they’re usually good at making money, and buying votes at $10 million a pop when they can’t win by definition is a bad investment.
Not to pull out a slippery slope argument, but that’s something I’d prefer the government not mess with more than it already does. Your sales pitch is awful. The best you can say for the plan is “the government might get a few spare dollars and probably not hurt democracy very much.” What’s the incentive?
I usually hate using slippery slope arguments too, but I have to do it here - if you allow votes to be sold for $10 million, sooner or later the legislature will lower the price to $1000, and from there to $10 or even less. Remember, the lower the price is, the more power the rich will have. No corporation will spend $10 million for a single vote; *all *of them would spend $10 million for a million votes.
Sane people (your hypothetical vain fools quick to part with their excess millions do not exist) won’t buy jack unless the votage/cost trade off is enough for them to see themselves making even one conceivable iota of a difference, and at that point you shouldn’t be selling. This is one case where I think the supply and demand curves don’t meet.
Rich people can already use their wealth to influence elections by funding PACs and lobbyists. Why pay 10 million for one vote, when they can buy TV ads and influence thousands of votes?
Consider the national debt is in excess of $10 trillion, how many votes do you intend to purchase and what’s your ROI timetable to make the entire project viable?
No businessman I, but I do know that ROI stands for Return On Investment.
Really, the entire suggestion doesn’t have much value beyond a joke. Like the Dilbert cartoon I once saw where Wally or the PHB or someone suggested pricing their product at ten million, one hundred dollars, and offering a ten million dollar rebate. All it would take would be one customer to not bother with the rebate process, and they’d be golden.
Fun idea to bat around over pizza and beer in the dorms, though.
What, precisely, are you referencing here? If it’s the recently signed Lily Ledbetter law, that was actual legislation, not an executive order.
And it’s not really accurate to call it “no time limit.” If a company stops paying discriminatorially, and no legal action is initiated for the next six months, they will effectively have gotten away with it, just as Goodyear did.
Of course, if you were referring to something else, please do elaborate.
