One reason you have a lot of rich people in Congress is because they can afford to be there. They can afford to run campaigns, they can afford to live the lifestyle, etc. It's easier to be elected to congress when you have your own personal wealth. Look, for example, at Mitt Romney and his campaign for the presidency: he funded a great deal of it with his own money, and he had a lot of wealthy friends contriubuing to his campaign. The same is true of those who run for congress. It's our system. If it didn't cost so much to run for office, we'd have far more economically ordinary people in Congress.
Um.
I don't know. I don't think I would want to vote for some guy who works as a Walmart Manager, who only earns $40,000 a year. Not because of his income... but because of his limited expertise and experience in the world.
There are some people who have been able to work their way into government without money.
But the truth is, we don't generally want to elect losers. I want people who have 'skin in the game'. Not some guy who makes $30K as an auto mechanic. What does that guy know about international relations?
The people who know enough about how national policy works, are often wealthy people.
Additionally, people tend to work their way up from lower levels of government. Often many people start in lower levels, and move from position to position, many times earning very little. But as we all know, there are many ways to make money in politics, and eventually you end up very wealthy before you end up in the Senate.
And lastly... Politics attracts a certain type of people. The most obvious and most prevalent... lawyers. Well clearly, if you are a lawyer, you are not going to be impoverished.
Most people at the lower income levels, have no interest whatsoever in being in politics. I would absolutely HATE being in politics. Not to mention, being honest and frank with people, is not an election winning plan.
Would *YOU* want to be in politics? Think about that. You really want every single word you ever speak, analyzed by every hack and partisan in the country? You really want every accidental word you speak, taken out of context, and splashed across international news channels?
Do you want responsibility for every action by every single Federal employee in the entire country?
Now I have blamed the IRS, and laughed at their "those emails magically were lost" explanation. But if you go through all my posts, I have never blamed Obama directly for the IRS scandal. Why? Because I truly believe it is entirely possible that the IRS was doing stuff Obama didn't know about. There are just under 3 MILLION Federal Employees.
Take a look at this page real quick.
List of United States federal agencies - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
This is a list of Federal Government Agencies.
When I hit print preview.... it says that this cite, is 34 pages long.
When some government agency does something crazy, and the politicians stand up and say "We didn't know about this"... many times... I believe them. You think you as a Congressman, or a Senator, are going to know what every single one of those thousand government agencies is doing? You are crazy. It would take you a couple of weeks, to go through the actions of every single agency, just once. But those Agencies are being changed and reorganized, and doing different things, every single month. And by the way.... there is no official government list of agencies. Even the government doesn't know exactly how many there are. This is just a list compiled by people on Wiki.
Back to the point.... Not many people are interested in this kind of thing. Just saying.... not many want this type of responsibility, or authority. The idea that if money wasn't required, then average people would do it, just isn't all that true. Look at the Founding Fathers of this country, back in 1776.
Of the 74 Delegates at the Constitutional convention... 35 were lawyers. Surprise. 13 were Merchants, 11 were Securities merchants (aka bankers), 7 were Land Speculators (land brokers and land lords), and 14 were massive plantation owners, or operators (Walmart people). (some overlap in here, that's why the numbers don't add up).
Out of all of them, only 2 were small farmers, 4 were doctors, 2 scientists, and 8 were career politicians which at that time was a very low wage.
So maybe 10 people were 'average joes'. The rest were wealthy. Nothing has changed. In fact, percentage wise, it's not all that different from today.
