If you’re like me, you were chuckling to yourself about how the Russian military was done in by corruption and lies about how battle ready they were. " typical Soviet crap." I thought.
Well turns out we have our own version. It’s just that the $s are bigger and the number of folks in on the take is a lot larger. Democracy, amirite?
In brief, we designed a fast combat ship to sail close to shore at high speed to deal with smugglers and terrorists. Since 2001, that focus has changed as the navy turns its attention towards defense wrt other naval powers, like China. These ships carry little armor ( speed) since they were designed to deal with less militarized enemies.
Well, the Navy wants to scrap the whole line. Poor design, shoddy workmanship, and huge cost overruns convinced the brass it isn’t worth salvaging. They proposed
But the Pentagon last year made a startling announcement: Eight of the 10 Freedom-class littoral combat ships now based in Jacksonville and another based in San Diego would be retired, even though they averaged only four years old and had been built to last 25 years.
Government salaries need to be higher to match private sector opportunities. That way we get rid of things like officials being offered jobs after holding office in exchange for political favors as they’d be more willing to stick with their duties involving running the country. We need to make the comp salary based and get rid of pensions.
Best of all, without pensions we can get rid of all the pesky pension actuaries who are leeching off an unsustainable system of ponzi schemes.
The beginning and end of that paragraph seem at odds with each other. “We need to give them enough money so they don’t want more when they are out of office. Also, we should stop giving them money when they are out of office.
I’m pretty sure there’s no upper limit to how much money a person wants, so I’m not convinced that your solution would help at all.
I agree that the possibility of lucrative positions later is a problem, but I think the only chance of dealing with that is setting up rules for where govt officials are allowed to work after office. I have no idea what any such rules would look like. I doubt anyone does, which is why it isn’t going to be dealt with anytime soon.
Maybe that’s true for some other reason, but I doubt it would have any impact in reducing corruption. It would probably increase it, since now people would be willing to make even more under-the-table deals to get help getting elected.
Well for starters, no sane person who makes an honest living would want to become a congressman because they can make more via just about any white collar job.
I actually don’t think Congress is at fault for a lot of corruption. The bureaucracy gets a lot of the blame IMO. In the pharmaceutical space for instance the FDA will approve anything because most people at the FDA leave the FDA and get jobs at pharmaceutical manufacturers. The relationship is far too cozy for real scrutiny and many drugs are approved these days when they don’t really do anything new and sometimes don’t do anything (the Alzheimer’s drug recently approved by the FDA that CMS won’t even pay for).
Just strike down the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 and go back to 1 rep per 30,000 people. Then sell the football team off to another city and take over their stadium for legislative work.
(Side comment: Some people say that that Act is unconstitutional, but the actual text of Article I vs. the actual text of the Act doesn’t seem to make it 100% clear that it is.)
Yes, this is true. I advocate for a “jury duty”-type selection, where qualified uninterested people are selected from pools. And have some incentive where one wants to do a good job.
I think it would be cool to be part of drafting legislation and debating it and such. But being willing to go through the campaigns… ugh… no way. It’s so ugly.
A relative is on the city council of a two-bit suburban city where they live. Won the first election with a vote total of something like 347-330. But even at that level the mud-slinging was crazy. I can’t even imagine what hell it must be running for a seat in the United States congress.
There is no efficacy shown and it has adverse side effects. It also requires ct brain scans which are heavy on radiation and somewhat dangerous for older folks. On top of that it’s about $150,000 a year.
