comment: >
  
  Please do not submit low investment content. This subreddit is for genuine discussion. Low effort content, including memes, links substituting for explanation, sarcasm, and non-substantive contributions will be removed per moderator discretion.
context: Honestly, I think there are times when we need reps to make unpopular decisions that are in the long term public interest.  
  It’s a really bad idea in my mind to put more weight on following the whims of public approval. >
  
  Bingo. The most vexing problem with democracy is populism, the phenomenon of "leaders" jumping in front of whatever parade happens to be popular and pretending to lead it. We need free thinkers able to see a new path and brave enough to lead the way. >
  
  My AP government teacher called the representative layers of a republic “idiot filters” to make sure the stupid ideas never were implemented. But here we are lmao >
  
  That's the intention but POSIWID, representative layers just filter out people who don't run successful elections. There are a great many people who are successful at campaigning but are either dumb or bad representatives and vice versa. >
  
  I cannot for the life of me figure out what that acronym is. >
  
  the purpose of a system is what it does >
  
  No. Most politicians have a lot of travel and housing expenses that aren’t accounted for in stipends. Lowering their salary will further ensure that only the independently wealthy can serve in office as the salary is a mere drop in the bucket for them. What we need to do is overturn Citizens United as another commenter mentioned. >
  
  What would overturning Citizens United change? >
  
  Let's start with another question: What do you think Citizens United allows? >
  
  It struck down a specifc section of the BCRA. >
  
  Yes, and in doing so what did the case allow people to do that they couldn't do before? >
  
  Electioneering ads were banned for like 120 days before the election. That was struck down. >
  
  60 days.
  But in practical terms before CU, independent organizations could only run an ad saying, "America needs to build a wall, overturn Obamacare, start winning on trade, and get back to being great again." After CU the ad could say "America needs to build a wall, overturn Obamacare, start winning on trade, and get back to being great again, so vote Trump." >
  
  Yup. So overturning CU wouldn't do much. Not by itself anyways. >
  
  No. Politicians are generally not driven by their compensation. Many are independently wealthy or expect to make money in careers after politics. >
  
  I've long thought it would be interesting to see what happens if we did something like raise pay for Congressmen, Senators, and senior executive officials to something like $3-5M a year in hopes of drawing more Fortune 100 SVP type of executives into legislating. Many of them are the most competent managers and problem solvers in the country, but aren't interested in taking a 90%+ pay cut out of some sense of civic duty. If they were able to be more successful in solving problems and budgeting than the current crop of politicians, the investment would be well worth it. >
  
  That would be rational but no one wants that so it will never happen. Left-wing people hate people getting rich, right-wing people hate government officials getting rich. >
  
  
  Left-wing people hate people getting rich
  
  Left wing people don't hate people getting rich. We hate people getting richer and richer while avoiding paying their fair share of taxes while everyone else is falling farther and farther behind.