from Hacker News

American Democracy Is Drowning in Money

by iamjeff on 9/20/17, 8:08 PM with 180 comments

• by AmIFirstToThink on 9/20/17, 9:34 PM

  I am actually amazed at how little money is needed to influence politicians.

  Lobbying exists because the return on investment is ridiculously high in favor of person asking for favorable treatment from politicians in policy making. It is peanuts invested and Boeing 747s harvested.

  If anything the cost of buying a politician should increase multiple orders of magnitude. Currently hundred, two hundred thousands to a senator's re-election campaign can buy really serious attention to your concerns. It needs to be hundreds of millions to buy a senator.

  Politicians should start Patreon campaigns to get livable wages from supporters and then just execute on what they stand for. Bernie and Trump was essentially that, self/people funded efforts.

• by cwkoss on 9/20/17, 8:54 PM

  If it costs millions of dollars to be a viable candidate, is it still accurate to call it "democracy"?

• by lxmorj on 9/20/17, 9:49 PM

  Singapore model. Market wages for the best talent (millions+). Huge penalties for corruption.

• by shmerl on 9/20/17, 9:28 PM

  TL;DR: democracy is being replaced with plutocracy and legalized corruption.

• by sharemywin on 9/20/17, 9:02 PM

  From the article:

  "Of course, it takes more than money to win elections. In both the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections, the candidates who spent the most money lost."

• by bkohlmann on 9/20/17, 9:13 PM

  In 2016, US GDP was over 16 trillion dollars. Spending approx 0.033% of GDP every 4 years (~6bn per the article) in a Presidential election doesnt seem all that unreasonable to govern such a large economy.

  [edited since i had my original order of magnitude too low!]

• by rayiner on 9/20/17, 9:15 PM

  > “The corruption in the U.S. does not stem from officeholders putting money in their pocket,” he said. “This is systemic corruption of the process itself. When you are dealing with billions and billions of dollars, much of that focused on buying influence, it overwhelms the system, and it is much harder to defend against and maintain representation for ordinary Americans.”

  In other words, if you accuse someone of taking a bribe, you had better be able to back it up. If you hand-wave about "systemic corruption," no proof is necessary.

• by djschnei on 9/20/17, 9:16 PM

  solution: Make the political system have less influence in our lives. Make politicians less valuable to purchase

• by RickJWagner on 9/21/17, 12:02 AM

  Bernie almost ran a good grass roots campaign in 2016. (Funded by $27 donations). But of course Big-Bucks Clinton controlled the DNC and cheated that race.

  Trump actually spent less than his competitors and managed to win both the primary and the election. It wasn't a budget campaign, but he did seem to get good bang for his spent dollars.

• by erikb on 9/20/17, 9:37 PM

  The thinking is wrong I believe.

  Our current world system and world view has long overcome it's peak. There is not much to gain, and the whole system slowly breaks and falls apart. That means there are not many true opportunities to grow value anymore. And the old profit and safety providers are getting rarer and rarer. For instance putting your money on the bank or buying index funds is no guarantee for safety anymore.

  In that time of decline of course people pay more and more to get the same level of safety, which really becomes more valuable by becoming rare, and also becoming more pricey by the money having less internal value.

  What is money worth if the amount of islands to stay on gets smaller and nobody being willing to trade his island for a few slices of paper?

• by simonsarris on 9/20/17, 9:33 PM

  Democracy is a very silly way to do anything. How many people in your town or city do you think could give you seriously valuable political advice? Think of the most effective companies in the world: Are they democracies internally?

  (No. They have a board of directors who appoint a CEO-person with wide latitude and therefore real political will to implement improvements. Shareholders watch or they can revolt, but not much else. Thankfully.)

  If you want to do democracy, the best way to do it would be as bottom-up. The more distributed things are, the harder it is for money to make a mark.

  The best democracy would be one where people care fiercely who their local politicians are, and are more or less disinterested in who the president might be.

• by yuhong on 9/20/17, 11:13 PM

  Right now I think things like the current debt based economy is a bigger problem than campaign donations at this point.

• by SamReidHughes on 9/20/17, 9:07 PM

  "Our democracy is drowning in money" can also be branded, "Our democracy is drowning in speech."

• by legulere on 9/20/17, 9:16 PM

  > In fact, the United States performed well on Transparency International’s 176-country Corruption Perceptions Index from last year, ranking 18th, behind Denmark (1st) and Germany (10th), but ahead of France (23rd) and Russia (131st).

  This is no wonder, the index is only about perception. In richer countries like Germany corruption in high politics and big companies is rarely seen by the population as corruption.

• by narrator on 9/20/17, 9:20 PM

  Pay politicians multi-million dollar salaries like they do in Singapore and you'll get top talent that doesn't need to be bribed and can focus on their actual jobs instead of pleasing lobbyists.

• by EGreg on 9/20/17, 9:08 PM

  Tell me again, why do we use voting instead of polling?

  http://magarshak.com/blog/?tag=polling

  Voting is susceptible to many things, including voter turnout and gerrymandering.

  Polling can be strictly better, and in fact it is what statisticians use who actually figure out what the population as a whole thinks.

• by nickysielicki on 9/20/17, 9:19 PM

  Seriously? No mention of how Barack Obama rejected public funding in 2008 and singlehandedly opened the floodgates on campaign spending? [1] The fact that this isn't directly mentioned anywhere in the article speaks to how far the credibility of the NYT has fallen. [2]

  [1]: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9595714...

  [2]: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/us/politics/20obamacnd.htm...

      ----
  

  edit: for a visual on how unprecedented his 2008 spending was, see charts here: http://metrocosm.com/2016-election-spending/

  Note the stability in spending starting in 1976 when public funding was introduced.