I've given our system some thought over my short number of years, I'd like to propose we make a few changes to it....
1) Every public office gets an average pay of its constituents. Local at the local level clear up to the president getting a national average.
2) Every public office would have term limits. Not advocating something crazy short, but nothing more than say 12 years of service and all positions count towards that. If you start at the local level you get 2 years max. If you get promoted to the state level you get another 5 years max. If you get promoted to national you get yourself another 5 years max. We could play with the overall max and the levels and improve this but I think it would clearly be better than how we handle it today.
3) Benefits are only paid to active public officials. Zero retirement plan beyond a 401k and that wouldn't even have matching funds deposited.
4) Voting is mandatory for the elected officials and as this is a truly a republic we operate under a method for quick feedback for the elected officials to hear from their constituents how they should vote on each matter. It would be easy to do this with technology available to us today. Hell American Idol has done it for years (and sadly gets more votes than even the presidential years if memory serves). Issue votes could be sent out weekly. You have 48 hours to cast your vote to your representative.
5) Remove all party tags completely. No one agrees with their "party" all the time anyway unless they blindly follow. I'd just as soon not have blind followers.
6) Voting in congress is done on an issue by issue basis only. I don't have "the" answer of how to do this with the actual budget, but there are plenty of things that get wrapped together that have no reason to be. Maybe each candidate votes for the order of the top 100 (or whatever) budget items and then the aggregate of that sets the order the budget is gone through in line item detail for a dollar amount assignment. Budget of the year is X if they only make it through 80% of the items they want to budget they get two chances to adjust the the numbers above, but once the total budget dollars are allocated then everything else is shelved until the next quarterly budget meeting (or whatever).
7) All laws and issues are wrote in plain English. If more than 20% of a panel of say average IQ 5th graders can't understand it then it is automatically eliminated from this weeks voter poll. If it can't be explained in terms an average 10 year old can understand then maybe we have a secondary panel of 16-18 year old's that can review it and it be allowed back on the voter poll.
Not suggesting I have all the answers or this is an all inclusive list, but I think these could be some relatively easy things to weed out anyone in it for themselves rather than the greater good of the nation.
Crime and punishment (I've posted elsewhere on some ideas there as well, but I recently thought of this one so I'm including it here) ... Any fines as part of punishments are a % of gross income. Parking ticket for someone making minimum wage stings the wallet the same way it does for someone making six or seven figures a year. Couple that with an increasing incentive to learn with subsequent offenses and they start including hard labor for a third offense. Bet your bottom dollar no one parks in a handicap spot (or whatever) a third time.
One man's opinion and definitely open to improvement
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