Play Now, Pay Later
Everybody sees that money is a problem in American politics. There's all that money going into getting elected. And then there's all that money that comes after leaving office: where the real payoff happens. Reformers often propose federally funded election campaigns. My own preference is to shrink the size of congressional districts. But there's another solution, an obvious one, if you think about it. A flat prohibition on all elected federal officials from ever working again in the private sector. That would require giving even a one-term congressman an annuity for life, but in the bigger scheme of things wouldn't paying retirement benefits for elected federal officials be cheaper than the social costs of former office holders conniving to cheat the taxpayer? It may seem an un-American proposal — no doubt in many ways it is — yet such a system is clearly better than having the federal government run by a set of competing crime syndicates, which is essentially what we've got now.
Posted by George Kenney on April 20, 2009 4:09 PM 
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Comments
No matter what national issue you set out to address, the bottom line is that we can't do what we clearly ought to do and what the majority of Americans want to do because those who own our government don't want to do it.
I keep coming back to a few basic ideas that are as politically impossible as they are indispensable to our democracy:
First, we must have a Constitutional amendment stating that no rights granted to citizens apply to corporations and that corporations are completely forbidden from participating in any way, directly or indirectly, in any part of any political process in the United States.
Second, I agree that we need to expand the number of seats in the House, at least to 760. That is still only 1 representative for every 400,000 citizens but it's a big improvement.
Third, we need to apportion the Senate by population as well, perhaps at a rate of one Senator for every 2 million citizens with the smaller states guaranteed at least one. That would give us around 144 Senators with California having 18 to Wyoming's 1.
Fourth, we should apportion representatives and Senators by computer rather than letting politicians gerrymander districts.
It might not prevent crime, but it would make life a lot more difficult for the Goldman Sachs crime family.
Posted by: Charles D
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April 20, 2009 5:13 PM
Carrying on the annuity idea,it seems very odd to me that you decapitate your civil service every four years.
This creates two obvious problems: finding reasonable candidates going in, particularly given the partisan context, and keeping those chosen from worrying more about feathering their nest after the job is done than they worry about actually doing the job.
[And no permanent secretaries either. Quite right. It's worth watching BBC's classic adaptation of "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" with Sir Alec Guiness (I re-watch it every couple years and always find something new) to see how this sort of thing can be useful. g.]
Posted by: David Ford | April 22, 2009 12:38 AM