Monday, December 05, 2011
Simple solution
Two big problems in fed politics:
(1) Congressmen are underpaid. Their salary is nowhere near enough to support two households comfortably. Even if they're not initially corrupt, they have to bring in more money, which opens the door to the corrupters.
(2) In recent elections, party operatives have figured out that it's much more reliable to suppress votes than to invite votes. They've learned how to make the whole shitmess so utterly and ferociously disgusting that rational voters would rather puke their guts up than mark a ballot. This leaves only the reliable robots in the game. (Why is this bad? Because it turns the whole concept of representation upside down. When you're trying to add voters, you're likely to do what voters want. When you're only trying to repel non-robots, you only need to obey the party boss.)
How to solve both problems: Pay for percent. Raise the max salary for Congress up to a half million, and make the annual pay during each term depend on the percent of eligible voters who actually voted in your district. If 70% of all eligible voters turned out, you get 70% of 500K = 350K.
But there's a catch. A base threshold. If the total of all votes in this district is less than 50% of eligible voters, the seat remains unfilled for this term. The district goes without representation for two years, and nobody gets any money or glory. If this results in a completely empty Congress, all the better for this unfortunate country. Congress has created nothing but raw brutal damage and destruction for all of my adult lifetime. Zero Congress = Zero Problems.
But even short of Zero, the base threshold would finally give voters a meaningful way to "throw them all out". For the first time nonvoting would send a real negative feedback signal to the pocketbooks of the "parties" and operatives. Under the current setup nonvoting is exactly what the operatives want you to do, so we have absolutely no way to tell both "parties" to fuck off. ¶ 1:52 PM
(1) Congressmen are underpaid. Their salary is nowhere near enough to support two households comfortably. Even if they're not initially corrupt, they have to bring in more money, which opens the door to the corrupters.
(2) In recent elections, party operatives have figured out that it's much more reliable to suppress votes than to invite votes. They've learned how to make the whole shitmess so utterly and ferociously disgusting that rational voters would rather puke their guts up than mark a ballot. This leaves only the reliable robots in the game. (Why is this bad? Because it turns the whole concept of representation upside down. When you're trying to add voters, you're likely to do what voters want. When you're only trying to repel non-robots, you only need to obey the party boss.)
How to solve both problems: Pay for percent. Raise the max salary for Congress up to a half million, and make the annual pay during each term depend on the percent of eligible voters who actually voted in your district. If 70% of all eligible voters turned out, you get 70% of 500K = 350K.
But there's a catch. A base threshold. If the total of all votes in this district is less than 50% of eligible voters, the seat remains unfilled for this term. The district goes without representation for two years, and nobody gets any money or glory. If this results in a completely empty Congress, all the better for this unfortunate country. Congress has created nothing but raw brutal damage and destruction for all of my adult lifetime. Zero Congress = Zero Problems.
But even short of Zero, the base threshold would finally give voters a meaningful way to "throw them all out". For the first time nonvoting would send a real negative feedback signal to the pocketbooks of the "parties" and operatives. Under the current setup nonvoting is exactly what the operatives want you to do, so we have absolutely no way to tell both "parties" to fuck off. ¶ 1:52 PM
