Hacker News Reader

Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

> But when asked whether lawmakers and their spouses should be prohibited from trading stock while in Congress, Pelosi said, “No,” adding that “this is a free market.”

I get iffier on this when you regulate family members. Children? Siblings? Parents? You'd be forcing a good number of Congressional spouses to retire if you implemented this without a gradual implementation.

I'd like to see lawmakers subject to similar restrictions as other insiders; having to openly plan their stock sales/purchases at least several months out. If you want a more actively managed portfolio than that, hire a financial firm to run a blind trust for you.

View on HN

>"You'd be forcing a good number of Congressional spouses to retire if you implemented this without a gradual implementation."

Call me jaded, but boo-hoo, so be it. The power and privileges that come with being so close to someone in power surely make up for the loss of being able to trade stocks.

If you’re not in house leadership, salaries are around $174,000. Depending on where someone is in their life (children in college, mortgage, etc) this may not be enough to be a single income earner in a family.

Not saying that family members should have unfettered abilities to trade, but having to use something like a trading plan or announcing trades prior or even just (gasp) enforcing insider trading laws against them, would be terrific.

That's 86th percentile for US household income. They can make do. Welcome to public service.

Members of Congress tend to wind up having to run two households, though, and I'm sure there's a variety of other sorts of expenses that are fairly unusual. Salaries haven't gone up in over a decade, either.

Limiting Congress to people who can independently afford the income/expense hit might not be optimal.

Yes, there's always excuses to "need" higher pay.

86th percentile is more than sufficient for representatives of the people.

If you view public service as requiring sacrifice, perhaps, but if you wish to attract folks you need to at least bring decent pay to the table.

And the second household is necessarily in one of the more expensive real estate markets in the country.

salaries havent gone up because they've opted to decline the increase for themselves.

no one is denying they should be paid for their work we're wish to deny them the right to fuck over working americans to line their pockets.

they can easily pass a bill to fund lodgings for congress critters in DC if they wanted. it'd certainly be cheaper for americans than this corruption.

> salaries havent gone up because they've opted to decline the increase for themselves

Well, sure; why would the wealthy incumbents want to make it easier for new, not-independently-wealthy candidates to break in? You probably limit the AOC-style folks a bit by not adjusting for inflation.

> they can easily pass a bill to fund lodgings for congress critters in DC if they wanted

I kinda like that idea; a little Versailles-y.

The whole idea of marriage is that their interests are united. A spouse is just one half of a two-shareholder corporation, so whatever covenants and restrictions there are shouldn't sit upon just one half but the whole.

That said, I do think it would be entirely legitimate to prohibit government service outside of the enlisted (non-officer) military ranks for direct relations of politicians during and some time after their term in office, it would just take a constitutional amendment and some very carefully thought out details.

For spouses I don't see a problem. In the US spouses cannot be forced to testify against one another in court. So (also) barring a spouse from benefitting from insider trading seems a fair trade-off.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com