Let's do a trade. Congress people get paid 1mil/year adjusted for inflation plus pension, but in return they don't get to own stocks or real estate while they are in office.
So, they can't own a home in a location they represent? I don't see that going over well. Your primary home is real estate. So is that little family cottage.
Also, congressional reps need to have a home is Washington. So, they have to rent there?
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2013/12/04/politics/real-alpha-house/ind...
After all it is positioning real estate as investments that contribute to its unaffordability.
That said, I don't think real estate is as easily abused as stocks. Much harder to influence the value.
They could always try renting. A lot of people manage to get by doing just that.
If their kids accept their inheritance, the rules apply to them too. The rules always apply to spouses.
Let them invest in whole-market funds / ETFs, but only allow withdrawls 5 years after leaving office.
Do you really want people greedier than that running the country?
Call me insane I guess.
We're a capitalist society. That doesn't mean "let companies do whatever they want, including buying politicians", it means "we use capital as a means of setting incentives to drive good outcomes". Let's use our capital incentives correctly to drive good outcomes from our elected leaders. They work for us.
I don't think rewarding certain behaviors like sponsoring is good, because its too easily abused. When a KPI becomes a target, its no longer a KPI.
Bonuses and promotions always go to those who exceed them, and "improvement plans" or "restructuring" is reserved to those who miss.
Any imperfect measure that becomes a target gets pursued at the expense of the original intent.
There are probably 2 or 3 orders of magnitude too many laws currently in America (have you ever estimated trying to read and comprehend the entire law? Borderline impossible in a single lifetime even under very optimistic reading-speed assumptions etc).
If this metric becomes a target and ceases to be a good metric, that sounds ideal because it'll have the side effect of drastically simplifying the legal code.
To be blunt, your whole polemic reads like a CATO fever dream, which is the opposite of what I was suggesting; ideological contrivance isn't a solve, and complexity at a nation our size and scope ain't gonna get reduced to a nice pamphlet of rules. It's the same reason you can't run a FAANG company the same way you run a 6 person A-round company.
I'm open to disallowing real estate speculation.