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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (20504)	6/14/2007 4:42:50 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

Like everything in government it would take a while for the system to get corrupted. While democrats have seta modern day record for fastest expiration of campaign promises that got them elected, most politicians don't sell out in under 90 days. Generally it takes years if not decades for them to rearrange the system to enable them to waste with impunity. It we adopt a Constitutional Amendment that calls for Congress and the PResident's salaries and retirement benefits to be only paid from budget surpluses and to disallow arrearages it might create a desire to balance the budget "You would probably get more "creative accounting" to offically have surpluses when we really are in deficit. Some of it would be straight out deceptive accounting. Other parts would be things like loan guarantees replacing direct spending." I suspect that any solution that people can come up with to limit their elected persons' ability to waste and "buy" votes will eventually be circumvented. The vacation from waste would be welcome even if brief. "To the extent that you have times when the politicians don't get paid, you push the leadership of our country even more to being limited to the very wealthy. That's not nearly as much of a concern for me as it is for some others, but its not an issue of absolutely zero concern." Some of the most harmful politicians are the ones who start out poor like Torch Torricelli, Hillary, and John Kerry. These are examples of people who pretend to be populists while only looking out for how they can corruptly enrich themselves and to a lesser extent their cronies. Some of the wealthy like Teddy Kennedy and LBJ are just as corrupt.