Bipartisan group, unveil bill to ban Congress/lawmakers from owning stocks

&gt; Ocasio-Cortez said the &quot;ability to individually trade stock erodes the public&#x27;s trust in government.&quot;<p>Actually, it&#x27;s worse than that. It erodes trust in the entire system. Not only can they trade on privileged information, they can use their power to influece industry, markets, etc.<p>Random example: for-profit prisons. Have a handful of representatives benefitted from stock trades and the privatization of prisons? Probably. But that&#x27;s nothing compared to the cost of the sociopolitical damage caused by The Prison Industrial Complex that those representatives enabled.<p>Look how many politicians leave office for jobs that pay 10x more. We&#x27;re told it is for their future influence. But how often is it for served-special-interests job well done? Let&#x27;s not be naive.<p>And while we&#x27;re on the general subject, how is it the SC doesn&#x27;t have a formal code of ethics?

This should be coupled with a massive increase in salaries for politicians - a lot of people think they should be paid less because they do a poor job. I think it&#x27;s the other way around - they do a poor job because they aren&#x27;t paid enough.<p>Politicians are the most influential people in any given country. If the salary alone becomes a good incentive for people to go into politics, you&#x27;ll get less ideologues, more people who would otherwise go into the private sector, less of a disconnect between their status and their wealth and less of an incentive to take corrupt deals, since they&#x27;re already independently wealthy.

This is the only good thing that ever came from AOC.