Simple Economics Lesson...

[Crissa]

[*] Macroeconomics and microeconomics are vastly different.

[*] Federal Budgets are macro and personal budgets are micro.

[*] Laying off Government Employees when there is a Deficit of Employment is making the deficit worse.

[*] Suspending unemployment benefits has a similar effect (but ultimately worse) than laying off workers.

That's all.

-Crissa

QED, Bobby Jindal

[MfA]

[*] Laying off Government Employees when there is a Deficit of Employment is making the deficit worse.

Meh if cuts have to be made cutting government employees probably causes less unemployment than cutting public spending ... better to pay people to build roads than to pay people to drink coffee.

[Username17]

Government employees are government spending. The people being employed by the government to make roads are employees of the government.

-Username17

[Fallen Hero]

I wonder how long it will be before Ontario gets ,,Rae days" back?

We've had the auto industry hemmoraging (sp?) employees.

[Crissa]

Meh if cuts have to be made cutting government employees probably causes less unemployment than cutting public spending ... better to pay people to build roads than to pay people to drink coffee.

This doesn't make sense. I mean, sure, it's better to have two good things (a road and paid people) better than one (paid people).

But the road doesn't help the economy now. The paid people do.

So making any cuts in government spending makes the immediate situation worse.

-Crissa

[Koumei]

Kevin Rudd has warned that politicians might need to take another pay cut over here. Opposition said "It's a terrible idea, because I like having lots of money." "If you do that, we'll be so low-paid that only morons, clowns and losers will enter politics."

How would we be able to tell them apart from the rest?

But it might be a good thing to have clowns in office: they could save fuel by car-pooling, ten clowns in one Volkswagen!

A better (but less popular amongst politicians) idea than just cutting jobs, anyway.

[cthulhu]

To be honest, onlyclowns, losers and morons do enter politics. Or the extremely power hungry. Someone like Murdoch is extremely unlikely to turn their extensive talents (and he is talented if evil) to the public good because of the incentives not to do so.

In my opinion, politicians (and civil servants?) salaries, and more importantly retirement benefits, should be linked to median incomes, or mean incomes excluding the top 10% wealthiest of the population, or counting them at half weight or something.

That would be a good idea: Stops them voting themselves pay rises, and encourages long term thinking because it links their wealth to the wealth of the average man.

[Heath Robinson]

In my opinion, politicians (and civil servants?) salaries, and more importantly retirement benefits, should be linked to median incomes, or mean incomes excluding the top 10% wealthiest of the population, or counting them at half weight or something.

Why not modal income?

Or some more complex determinant based on multiple averages. It seems that Medians and Means are both easy to manipulate upwards without actually serving the majority of the population.

[Tshern]

Kevin Rudd has warned that politicians might need to take another pay cut over here. Opposition said "It's a terrible idea, because I like having lots of money." "If you do that, we'll be so low-paid that only morons, clowns and losers will enter politics."

Politicians need to be paid decently, if they got six bucks an hour any twisted smuck with a job could just buy half of your precious senators.

[Gelare]

In my opinion, politicians (and civil servants?) salaries, and more importantly retirement benefits, should be linked to median incomes, or mean incomes excluding the top 10% wealthiest of the population, or counting them at half weight or something.

Why not modal income?

The idea of making politicians accountable for their decisions by reflecting this in their pay is theoretically a good goal, but doing it in any of the above ways is, with all due respect, god-awful.

Based on mean: Politicians will aim to maximize GDP without consideration for how this is accomplished or other long-term goals.
Based on median: Politicians will aim to enrich the middle class at the expense of the rich and the poor, but mostly the poor since the rich can buy influence.
Based on mode: I'm not even sure what this would mean, since salaries are variable enough across the country that there's really no guarantee that politicians' pay will in any way reflect their performance. And if you try to count brackets (0-25K, 25-50K, etc.) you have a peculiar case of politicians trying to lump as many people into as high a bracket as possible while ignoring anyone who isn't required to give that bracket a plurality.

How should it be done? Well, I have no idea. But it should incorporate far more than just incomes, since increasing incomes is not the only task politicians should be concerned with.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Politicians (at least in the first world) are not really about money. Nobody tries for elected office to get fat paid, because with the same skills they could get much fatter paid in the private sector. Politics is about power and pushing an agenda.

[Username17]

Don't forget the stupidly large piles of money you can get for having been a former politician. Just the fact that a former senator has the phone numbers of almost every other senator on speed dial means that he personally can rake in millions as a consultant to companies that want to be able to talk to people who can talk to the people who are drafting the legislation. Even without actually influencing proceedings, the simple knowledge of what the next year's regulations are going to look like can be worth seven figures, and it isn't hard for a reasonably connected and even scrupulously honest former senator to provide that.

Most senators would work for a dollar a day if they could figure out how to survive their 6 year term. The golden parachute waiting any of them who leave office is larger than any government paycheck would ever be. Congressional salaries are a convenient thing to bitch about, but they don't even matter in terms of corruption incentives. Do you have any idea of how much money was waiting for Dick Cheney when he stopped being Vice President? Services rendered landed him in piles of cash so large that if he had paid a hundred thousand dollars a year for the privilege of working that job he still would have come out ahead of the game.

-Username17

[Gelare]

Most senators would work for a dollar a day if they could figure out how to survive their 6 year term. The golden parachute waiting any of them who leave office is larger than any government paycheck would ever be. Congressional salaries are a convenient thing to bitch about, but they don't even matter in terms of corruption incentives.

True dat.

[cthulhu]

In my opinion, politicians (and civil servants?) salaries, and more importantly retirement benefits, should be linked to median incomes, or mean incomes excluding the top 10% wealthiest of the population, or counting them at half weight or something.

Why not modal income?

The idea of making politicians accountable for their decisions by reflecting this in their pay is theoretically a good goal, but doing it in any of the above ways is, with all due respect, god-awful.

Based on mean: Politicians will aim to maximize GDP without consideration for how this is accomplished or other long-term goals.
Based on median: Politicians will aim to enrich the middle class at the expense of the rich and the poor, but mostly the poor since the rich can buy influence.
Based on mode: I'm not even sure what this would mean, since salaries are variable enough across the country that there's really no guarantee that politicians' pay will in any way reflect their performance. And if you try to count brackets (0-25K, 25-50K, etc.) you have a peculiar case of politicians trying to lump as many people into as high a bracket as possible while ignoring anyone who isn't required to give that bracket a plurality.

How should it be done? Well, I have no idea. But it should incorporate far more than just incomes, since increasing incomes is not the only task politicians should be concerned with.

Yeah, you need to come up with a sophisticated and difficult to game measure of 'real wealth' possibly with some sort of weighted mean - you could choice to weight up the poor and weight down the rich for example.

[Gelare]

Yeah, you need to come up with a sophisticated and difficult to game measure of 'real wealth' possibly with some sort of weighted mean - you could choice to weight up the poor and weight down the rich for example.

Even that is nigh-useless, because the fact is,

Most senators would work for a dollar a day if they could figure out how to survive their 6 year term. The golden parachute waiting any of them who leave office is larger than any government paycheck would ever be. Congressional salaries are a convenient thing to bitch about, but they don't even matter in terms of corruption incentives.

Being a congressman just is a lucrative job, and there's really nothing you can do to the salary or benefits to change that. It would be kind of nice if you could, but you basically can't. Probably you'd be better off focusing on stuff that goes on during the actual election to weed out the incompetent ones and the liars; which isn't to say that's an easy task either, because it's not.

[Username17]

Yeah, imagine that someone is scrupulously honest and is a legitimately concerned environmental advocate. And then he gets out of congress because his term is up and he wants to spend more time with his family or his state has term limits or he loses an election. Whatever.

Now he's an insider. He knows the other senators. He knows how the process works. He knows the people who write the legislation the senators are deliberating on. He has frankly incredibly valuable expertise. Now a big bad polluting company comes up to him and offers him a deal: can he find out for them what the environmental legislation coming down the pipe is likely to do and mean for their company?

And the thing is, he can. And he's on a very short list of people in the entire world who can give out that information, because it really takes a lot of puzzle pieces to put that together. And if he's an environmental advocate, he wants them to have that information. The easier they make the transition to the new rules the better those rules will look, the less accidental violations (and thus less total pollution) there will be, and the better the planet will do now and in the future. He's not on their side, he's not pulling any strings on their behalf, he just wants them to know ahead of time what the law is ultimately going to require them to do so that they can start the changeover right now and get that shit done in a gradual and painless fashion instead of waiting until the legislation is coming due and then doing an expensive and possibly failed scramble to update practices all at once. And if they are smart, they'll pay him what? A hundred thousand dollars? More? His input will save them hundreds of thousands of dollars, so why wouldn't they?

And that's even before we get into anything unethical or even questionable. The fact is that this guy probably did some favors for a lot of senators over his years in office and he can call them in to get a number of seemingly inconsequential changes written into law. How much would it be worth to one company or another to designate this hundred square kilometers of forest as preserve instead of that hundred square kilometers? How much would it be worth their while to pay him to not call in favors to lower the Bromine allowance until their factories weren't in compliance? If he started shaking down corporations for consultations, how many zeroes could he add to that paycheck?

Yeah, being an ex-legislator is always going to be lucrative. The information and contacts you have literally can be used to predict and influence the spending of trillions of dollars. In the world of high finance, that kind of information can influence the outcome of bets worth even more. The fact that ex-senators only die with millions or hundreds of millions of dollars means that if anything they are being fairly restrained as a group.

-Username17

[Bigode]

And the thing is, he can. And he's on a very short list of people in the entire world who can give out that information, because it really takes a lot of puzzle pieces to put that together. And if he's an environmental advocate, he wants them to have that information. The easier they make the transition to the new rules the better those rules will look, the less accidental violations (and thus less total pollution) there will be, and the better the planet will do now and in the future. He's not on their side, he's not pulling any strings on their behalf, he just wants them to know ahead of time what the law is ultimately going to require them to do so that they can start the changeover right now and get that shit done in a gradual and painless fashion instead of waiting until the legislation is coming due and then doing an expensive and possibly failed scramble to update practices all at once. And if they are smart, they'll pay him what? A hundred thousand dollars? More? His input will save them hundreds of thousands of dollars, so why wouldn't they?

Isn't "they'll figure out how to sneakily do the next most harmful thing" what this actually means?

[Tshern]

Politicians (at least in the first world) are not really about money. Nobody tries for elected office to get fat paid, because with the same skills they could get much fatter paid in the private sector. Politics is about power and pushing an agenda.

I call bullshit on some parts of this statement. While most politicians probably are earnest when they start, but that doesn't mean they cannot be bought of if they never actually got the money they deserve from their jobs. Also, the sheer fact that you have been an influential politicians pretty much guarantees a stupendously good job at selling more nuclear weapons to the government.

[Crissa]

Yeah, it's kinda expensive to commute to the capital, not see your family for days on end, need two homes, two many things...

...It's something that needs a decent wage. However, I'm totally for locking it to the minimum wage, in the US.

-Crissa

[Neeeek]

How much would it be worth to one company or another to designate this hundred square kilometers of forest as preserve instead of that hundred square kilometers?

Just FYI, that sort of thing is typically taken care of at the agency level, not the legislative level.