Or a way to discourage anyone with any sort of wealth from running for office. Owning stocks isn’t a really weird thing that only a few oligarchs do.
I’d rather not rule out 56% of the population from running for office, because saying “just sell your holdings” is super naive. There are all kinds of issues with requiring people to sell their stock holdings to be in office.
Create an independent government agency that is responsible for maintaining congresspeople’s portfolios while they are in office. Or let them put everything into a blind trust.
I assume this would apply to their staffs as well?
For me it’s not even about enthusiasm. As I see it, there is one party that believes in climate change and there is one party that wishes to preserve democracy. They happen to be the same party.
Being involved in the stock market is not the same as owning stocks; having money in index funds, say, would hardly be the same as owning a big amount of shares of whatever, but being in a SPAC would be a lot worse.
However… we had a similar kind of discussion around here, and I was convinced it doesn’t really work. You can pass shares along the family line until it’s “okay”, or the spouses family, or a driver (sigh), or… and then get them back, all while directing the patsi’s investment if you need to. But I don’t see a reasonable privacy argument for not fully disclosing all financial investments for public officials and letting voters decide; even less so in privacy antagonist US.
The language I have seen proposed is “members of Congress, high-level aides, and the immediate families of both”.
Transparency is already law for congress I think. Similar divesting/non-trading rules are already in place for executive branch appointments / Cabinet / senate approved positions. This is one area that Democrats so far try to take seriously, but Republicans seem to not prioritize.
If Yellen can do it in 60 days to become Sec. Treasury, then Senator Burr and Rep. Collins can do it. The only argument I see is that congressional positions can in practice be almost life-long, which adds a harsher dimension to the restriction, but the power conflicts of interest grow over longer-term incumbency as well.
Not charts and graphs and stastical models, but there was a dude (an MD) that went and dug into it a bit:
(It’s actually a bit worse than triggercut’s description. Pain will be endured as long as it hurts those people more. “They vote against their economic interests” misses the point.)
Note that “white” has changed over the course of the nation’s history as well - think of the Irish, for instance.
Rothda and I don’t agree about much, but I find similar ethical problems with allowing members of Congress to hold equity in the companies who they regulate with their laws.
There are some issues with the data (timeframe differs slightly, data is older, etc.) but the gist is that members of congress do as well or better than corporate folks engaged in insider trading.
Based on this article in the New York Times, it appears subsequent studies have replicated the results, but the source link no longer works.
Demonstrated repeated deliberate trading on insider information (e.g. receiving briefing, closing positions, market then dives) and specifically trading on stocks directly before, during, and after officially negotiating govt policy affecting the companies.
They also get access to privileged information before the public quite often.
Hell, we saw it with Covid where members were selling stocks and buying stocks based on things they were told behind closed doors. And then they got caught. And then nothing happened anyway.
Unfortunately, there are a fair number of folks out there who lie awake at night losing sleep over the possibility that somewhere out there, a non-white person is receiving some sort of benefit that person has not 100% earned through hard work or clean living or whatever – even though the reality is that all of us here in the world have a mix of things that we’ve “earned” or deserve and things we haven’t or don’t.
I’m usually acutely aware that being born a middle class white male American is one hell of a starting die-roll. But then, I guess I’ve been drinking liberal koolaid all these years…
If you want to be perhaps more depressed, consider that this view is not at all limited to white people.
As a specific recent example, consider the views expressed by members of the black community towards policies that they felt would disproportionately benefit non black minorites. Such as immigration reform which would potentially “dilute” (the exact term used) the importance of blacks in the Democratic party.
Racism and tribalism is not at all limited to white people.
This is all true, and a weird thing that some people try to go so far as to deny. The big BUT here is that obviously in the US that white racism has been the thing that has had the institutional power and has broadly affected anyone who isn’t white. Racism by other racial minorities in the US has had much more limited reach.
