Ch. 3.12 | The Grift & the Republic: Can we realigning Congressional Incentives Before It’s Too Late?
Americans despise Congress but keep reelecting it. We can't vote our way out of a broken system that rewards outrage and grift. If we want different behavior from Congress, we must realign incentives.
Something fundamental is broken in the United States.
As I discuss throughout Chapter 3 | Challenges Need Leaders, our elected officials are failing us. They refuse to muster the courage to take a stand and solve the problems that threaten the prosperity of our great nation. Instead, they are captured by two political parties obsessed with division.
This is not about left or right. It requires us to address systemic failures. We the people have allowed a political-industrial complex to entrench itself to our detriment. Loyalty to party and donors is rewarded above loyalty to constituents, a conclusion documented by multiple academic and journalistic analyses.
Congress behaves as though its primary job is reelection rather than governing. New members are instructed by party leadership to spend as much as 20 to 30 hours a week fundraising from wealthy donors and interest groups. The people’s business takes a back seat to the business of staying in office. The incentive is reelection, not results. This is not conjecture. This is the reality of congress.
Our political leaders no longer prioritize governing, they prioritize performance. The incentive today is not to solve a problem but to go viral arguing about it. Lawmakers deliver blistering speeches designed for cable news and social media, while refusing to sit at a table and negotiate like adults. The country gets theatrics while the crises worsen. This is how the duopoly keeps us divided.
We elect our representatives to solve problems but instead they’ve adopted a permanent wartime posture against one another. For more than 10 years, the majorities in both parties view the “other side” as immoral and a threat to the country. In this environment compromise becomes betrayal, negotiation becomes weakness, and the American people pay the price for a political system that rewards conflict instead of solutions.
The truth is painfully clear. Our politics produce exactly the behavior it incentivizes. A system that rewards outrage will produce outrage. A system that rewards fundraising will produce fundraisers. A system that rewards party loyalty will produce partisans. What it will not produce is leadership. We have engineered incentives that actively punish compromise, discourage cooperation, and reward theatrics over governance. Until we realign those incentives, no reform, note even the ones I have championed in these pages, can fully take root1.
The core of my proposal here is simple: if we want different behavior from Congress, we must build a system that pays them for different behavior. If we want our political system to prioritize problem-solving, we must make problem-solving the behavior the system rewards.
So how do we change course when our representatives have become incapable of leading? Today, I want to explore a notion that may sound unhinged at first, but hear me out. What if we applied a framework of “conscious capitalism” to Congress? What if we paid for results that benefit the whole country? What if we created a lucrative incentive structure for elected officials that finally attracted the best and brightest to serve?
The Grift is the Problem
Congressional salaries have barely changed in decades. A member of Congress earns roughly $174,000 dollars a year to oversee a federal budget that exceeds 7 trillion dollars. Power of this scale managed by compensation of the current scale, creates a structural imbalance. It fails to attract the best talent. There was a time when citizens made sacrifices for the greater good. Great men and women grounded in principal who led by example and love of country. Where are those people today? I’m sure there are some leaders worthy of our respect, but the rank and file today have been captured by a political system that serves its own corrupt means and ends. Today, we attract individuals willing to accept a modest public salary, not because of self-sacrifice, but because they know the real revenue streams lie elsewhere. Human nature is such that behavior will always follow incentive. We see the results everywhere across the political spectrum.
The Stock Trading Problem
Congressional stock trading continues despite overwhelming public opposition. Although members of Congress are required to disclose their trades under STOCK Act of 2012, they are still legally permitted to buy and sell individual stocks even in sectors their committees regulate. This remains one of the most widely criticized conflicts of interest in the country. For example, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband have been reported to have turned an initial portfolio reportedly worth under $800,000 into roughly $130 million in gains while she served in Congress (an estimated return on the order of 16,000% over several decades), far above market benchmarks. Meanwhile, legislation intended to ban such practices —such as the Bipartisan Ban on Congressional Stock Ownership Act of 2023 (H.R. 1679) has stalled in committee despite bipartisan co-sponsors. Polling confirms the public’s position: a majority across party lines supports banning individual stock ownership by members of Congress. The concern is obvious: if a member of Congress sits on a committee that shapes technology regulation, defense procurement, health policy, or banking oversight, the public must trust that their votes are not influenced by the portfolio in their household. That trust does not exist today. The lack of trust extends beyond individual trades. Legislators who introduce or vote on major regimes for industries in which they or their spouses hold significant positions erode the foundational legitimacy of representative government. In this environment, the system of oversight and enforcement is weak; for instance, violations of the STOCK Act have resulted in minimal penalties and no high-profile prosecutions.
The Lobby’s Revolving Door
The revolving door between Congress and the lobbying industry never stops spinning. A significant share of former members of Congress become lobbyists (more than 45% of ex-Senators and 33% of ex-House members since 2000, per OpenSecrets.org, 2025). Federal lobbying reached nearly $3.9 billion in 2024, a historic high (CRP, 2024). This is legal, but contributes to public disillusionment and policy distrust (Gallup, July 2025, Congressional approval at 15%). They leverage insider knowledge and personal networks to influence legislation. The public knows this. That is why confidence in Congress sits near historic lows2. The perception is simple. Lawmaking has become a springboard to higher earning opportunities. Federal lobbying spending remains enormous. Billions of dollars are spent every year to influence legislation, regulation, procurement, and policy. This is legal. It is protected speech. But it is also part of the structural imbalance. Lobbyists and industry groups can offer influence, access, and future employment. Ordinary citizens cannot. These are established patterns. The problem is not individual morality. The problem is architectural. The system rewards behaviors that undermine the national interest while punishing those who try to act independently. We cannot fix it by moralizing; we must reverse the incentives.
Executive Branch Conflicts
But these issues are not limited to the Legislative branch. The Executive Branch is not above the fray. The Biden family’s foreign business dealings have fueled years of investigation and public concern. Several committees in Congress have examined Hunter Biden’s work with foreign companies while his father served as Vice President. These investigations have not proven a criminal quid pro quo by President Biden. But the larger point is structural. The public believes that family members of powerful officials should not be building private wealth from foreign sources that intersect with American foreign policy. When this happens, even if it is technically legal, trust collapses.
Now consider our current President. He’s perfected the “art of the steal.” A Reuters special investigation last month reported that the Trump family earned more than $800 million dollars in realized profits from sales of crypto assets in the first half of 2025 alone, largely through a venture called World Liberty Financial and a Trump-branded meme coin. More than 90 percent of the Trump Organization’s reported income in that period came from these crypto ventures. Much of the money appears to have come from foreign investors who were explicitly seeking proximity to the President of the United States and regulatory favor. Ethics experts interviewed by Reuters described the arrangement as “legal but unethical”, and as an “unprecedented” conflict of interest in modern presidential history because it aligns presidential decisions on crypto regulation and enforcement with the private enrichment of his family. As Joe Nocera observed in his op ed Inside Trump’s Crypto Cash Machine in the Free Press this week:
While no one has uncovered proof of a quid pro quo, crypto and ethics experts I spoke to said that is almost beside the point. “Every president since the Civil War has avoided financial conflicts until Trump because they knew it was the right thing to do,” said Richard Painter, who served as George W. Bush’s ethics counsel. Bush, for instance, sold his ownership stake in Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers before he decided to run, and Jimmy Carter sold his peanut farm in Plains, Georgia. Painter told me that the president and vice president are exempt from a criminal statute that makes it illegal for anyone else in the executive branch to be involved in anything that may affect their personal finances. But, he added, that shouldn’t matter. “The president should follow the same rules as everyone else.”
Whether one supports Trump or Biden, is a Republican, Democrat or Independent, the situation revealed a clear truth. The United States has no effective system for preventing our elected officials from blending public power with private enrichment. And it does seem that meeting the legal burden of proof on “quid pro quo” is often tricky but all of us see that the outcomes are obviously tied to the enrichment.
A Framework for Conscious Governing
As I discussed in Chapter 3.10 | Capitalism and Monetary Policy, “Conscious Capitalism” is a philosophy developed by John Mackey and Raj Sisodia that acknowledges a simple truth: markets work best when leaders pursue a higher purpose, honor their stakeholders, and create cultures rooted in integrity and responsibility. It does not reject profit. It argues that profit is sustainable only when aligned with the long-term wellbeing of everyone affected by an institution. Conscious capitalism is about harnessing the power of incentives to produce better outcomes for all stakeholders. A conscious enterprise does not chase short-term rewards at the expense of long-term value. When incentives are aligned with the interests of stakeholders, systems produce prosperity. When they are misaligned, they produce dysfunction. Critics argue that stakeholder capitalism sounds noble but dilutes accountability by giving leaders too many, and often contradictory, goals. In their view, profit is the only reliable measure of whether a company uses resources efficiently. Everything else introduces subjectivity and politicization. ESG, they say, is proof of how easily “purpose” becomes a political instrument rather than a performance standard. In the corporate world, this debate will continue. But in the public realm, conscious capitalism fits like a glove.
Government has one stakeholder: the American people. Government has one mission: the public good. Government has one higher purpose as outlined in the Preamble to the Constitution:
to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity...
Unlike corporate organizations, Congress has a clearly defined purpose and a “conscious” bottom line. Fiscal and Social responsibilities are inextricably linked.
Over decades, Congress has drifted away from its constitutional mission because the incentive structure rewards entirely different behaviors. When elections, donors, and party discipline overshadow the national interest, even well-intentioned leaders are forced into patterns that undermine the country’s long-term health.
The problem is not that our leaders lack patriotism. The problem is that the system punishes them for acting like patriots.
Today, Congress no longer operates with discipline, with conscious leadership, or with a culture that rewards integrity. Incentives shape behavior—and today’s incentives reward the exact behaviors Americans claim to hate: fundraising, outrage, grandstanding, and loyalty to tribe over country.
Now here is the crucial point: Congress today receives none of the compensation of a high-performing enterprise, and all of the access, influence, and opportunity to monetize political power privately.
And so the question becomes straightforward: What would happen if we redesigned Congress’s incentive structure to reward solving problems rather than performing outrage?
What Would Corporate America Pay the “C-suite” of a $7 Trillion corporation?
To answer that question, we should start with a comparison that forces clarity.
C-suite pay at America’s largest corporations, when including base salary, bonuses, and especially stock options and restricted stock, can be immense. In 2024–2025, the median S&P 500 CEO’s total compensation was approximately $18–23 million, while the most highly paid CEOs earned packages exceeding $100 million—primarily due to massive stock awards and options. For other top c-suite executives, compensation typically ranges from 30% to 45% of CEO pay, so it’s common for COOs, CFOs, CTOs, and similar roles to earn $5–15 million including incentives.
At the highest end, CEO compensation for the world’s largest market cap companies regularly reaches tens of millions—and sometimes far beyond—when equity awards and stock options are included. For example, Apple’s Tim Cook earned about $74.6 million in 2024, almost $60 million of which was in stock awards and incentives. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella received $96.5 million for fiscal 2025, with over $84 million in stock awards alone. Google/Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai received a historic $280 million in compensation in 2019 (driven by a triennial stock award grant), though more typical years are around $10–13 million base, with periodic large equity boosts. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy earned $40.1 million in 2024, driven by stock vesting, with one-off grants in the hundreds of millions during prior years.
Extreme outliers, such as Elon Musk’s historic pay proposal at Tesla, have involved multi-year performance stock awards aggregating to many billions if targets hit; one recent board proposal pegged Musk’s theoretical package at $1 trillion, though most years are much less. The highest one-year compensation observed in major public filings was over $189 million (Brad Jacobs, QXO, Inc.), followed by other executives in the $150–170 million range, usually fueled by market-timed equity grants.
Now, let’s be clear, to achieve those compensation levels, an organization must excel. They must perform at the highest level. These executives run the largest and most profitable, highest growth companies in the world. Their compensation is tied to creating “shareholder value.”
To attract the best and the brightest to serve our country, we need to re-examine how we pay our leaders.
For perspective, if you extrapolated this pay structure to a hypothetical $7 trillion “corporation” with a leadership team of 561 (the size of Congress plus the Cabinet), the total compensation package could easily exceed $6–12 billion per year and each would be compensated accordingly:
Rank-and-file Members → $1.2M–$1.5M
Committee members → $2M
Congressional leadership → $3M–$7M
Senators → $2M–$2.5M
Senate leadership → $8M–$15M
Cabinet secretaries → $5M–$12M
The President → $100M++
These figures reflect not extravagance, but the market value of successful leadership at scale. So we must confront this reality.
Change Incentives And You Change Outcomes
Low salaries + high temptation = corruption as a structural inevitability.
This is the foundational insight: If we want Congress to behave like a conscious, high-performing enterprise, we must build a compensation and accountability model that mirrors one.
We must recognize that we have created the worst of both worlds:
Public compensation too low to attract top talent
A political culture offering infinite private enrichment opportunities
No KPIs
No performance standards
No accountability
And no connection whatsoever between national outcomes and congressional reward
Given the level of responsibility alone, I would argue that $500,000 should be the minimum “market rate” base salary that we should pay a member of Congress. Market rate compensation makes the position more attractive, especially to younger generations who would find that base salary plus benefits to be highly competitive with any other career path they might otherwise choose. We change the incentives, we change the behavior. By moving to a market rate salary, we not only expand the pool of talent, but we tie the upside to a codified set of moral and ethical standards that are no longer customs or guidelines but enforceable by penalty of law. Ethics rules would govern the contract. Full transparency of any dollars received from PACs and SuperPACs.
But higher salaries alone are not enough. If we raise compensation without transforming the rules that govern conduct, we risk merely creating better-paid grifters. The current ethics framework looks strict on paper, but in practice it is almost entirely toothless. Members of Congress are technically prohibited from using nonpublic information for personal gain, but enforcement depends on self-policing. The STOCK Act requires disclosure of stock trades, yet violations routinely result in nothing more than a $200 late fee. Gift rules, outside-employment restrictions, and conflict-of-interest prohibitions all rely on committees made up of the very Members they are supposed to oversee.
Any meaningful incentive reform must therefore be paired with an enforceable ethics regime. That means:
A complete ban on individual stock trading by Members, spouses, and dependent children no options, no crypto, no sector-specific investments. Only diversified index funds or true blind trusts.
Automatic penalties for violations forfeiture of profits, significant fines, loss of committee assignments with no internal votes or partisan negotiation. Severe violations will disqualify members from standing for re-election.
Independent enforcement through an Ethics Authority structurally insulated from Congress itself, potentially housed within or overseen by the Judicial branch as a proper check of congressional power, with subpoena power, investigative capacity, and the ability to refer cases to the Department of Justice..
Mandatory recusal whenever a Member’s household has a financial interest in a sector under consideration.
A lifetime ban on lobbying or paid influence work after leaving office. No “strategic advising,” no foreign-agent consulting, no revolving-door monetization.
Real-time financial transparency, including all outside income, PAC and SuperPAC activity, nonprofit affiliations, and any form of compensated advocacy.
These reforms are not punitive. They are protective for the nation and for the lawmakers themselves. If Congress is to be compensated like high-performing executives, then Members must also be bound by the same expectation of fiduciary responsibility. Under a true performance-based model, high pay is not a privilege. It is a contract. And that contract must include strict safeguards to ensure public service cannot be exploited for private gain.
No incentive model can eliminate every corrupting force in politics. The point is not to design a perfect Congress. The point is to build one where the easiest way to thrive is to serve the country well not to game the system. A performance-based framework grounded in the principles of conscious capitalism can realign expectations and behavior in a way that is both measurable and enforceable.
This is Not without precedent.
Around the world, countries have taken varied approaches to compensating their top public officials and designing safeguards to protect the public interest. For example, Singapore pays entry-level ministers around $900,000–$1.1 million (USD equivalent), with roughly one-third to 40% of compensation in variable ‘national bonus’ and performance components tied to GDP growth, median income, low-income income growth, and unemployment. Notably, Singapore’s system requires mandatory divestiture to prevent conflicts of interest, and the country maintains public trust levels well above 70 percent according to the Institute of Policy Studies. Many EU countries (UK, France, Germany) restrict their use of performance-related pay to mid-level officials rather than top politicians, owing to concerns about political gaming and the complexity of attribution. Nordic countries such as Denmark combine competitive political salaries with some of the toughest transparency standards in the world. Public trust in their institutions consistently ranks among the highest globally and far above U.S. levels in surveys by the OECD and others.
These international examples illustrate both the diversity of pay and ethics systems and the central importance of robust enforcement and independence in fostering public trust and accountability. Where compensation is higher and tied to clear public interest metrics backed with stringent, externally enforced safeguards public trust in government tends to be strongest. Where such rigor is lacking, skepticism and cynicism persist. The United States currently finds itself at the lower end of both compensation and trust, highlighting just how far-reaching real reform must be.
Incentive Compensation: The Payoff is Performance
In a July 7, 2011 CNBC interview conducted by Becky Quick, Warren Buffett once proposed a simple rule that he posited would end the country’s deficit spending:
You just pass a law that says that any time there’s a deficit of more than 3 percent of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election. Now you’ve got the incentives in the right place, right? So it’s capable of being done.
He argued that if political survival depended on fiscal discipline, the deficit would disappear quickly. This idea is powerful because it is structural. It creates consequences that are automatic and ungameable.
Combined with a pay-for-performance model and it builds a system where success is rewarded and failure ends a political career immediately. This structural accountability must form the bedrock of our performance model. No theatrics. No excuses. No hiding behind a party. You balance the books or you do not serve again.
The obvious criticism is that this rule creates perverse incentives. Lawmakers might slash essential programs or underinvest in long term needs simply to hit a deficit target.
To address this, the Buffett rule must be paired with a true conscious capitalism framework whereby performance is measured not solely by profit, but by progress toward the organization’s higher purpose. Measurable outcomes define success. Lawmakers would only remain eligible for reelection if they meet deficit targets AND maintain or improve performance on core social KPIs such as child poverty and access to care. This dual test blocks cruelty disguised as fiscal discipline.
Applied to Congress, this means incentive compensation must be tied to well defined Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in two moral dimensions:
Economic: because a nation drowning in debt, unable to control its spending, and incapable of meeting its future obligations cannot care for anyone.
Social: because a nation that balances the books by abandoning the vulnerable is not a nation worth preserving.
These two pillars are not opposites. They are dependencies. A country cannot be compassionate if it is insolvent. And it cannot be solvent if it is unjust.
This is the philosophical foundation for a performance-based model of governance. A model in which Congress is rewarded not for partisanship, theatrics, or fundraising, but for measurable national outcomes that strengthen both the fiscal health and the social fabric of the country.
Pillar one. Economic KPIs that protect the future.
America’s solvency crisis is not one problem. It is a constellation of interconnected failures, each driven by incentives that reward avoidance over resolution. Congress sidesteps the hardest decisions because the political risks of solving them outweigh the political rewards. Nowhere is this clearer than in the core components of our long-term fiscal stability.
The National Debt and America’s inflationary Trap. The current national debt of the United States has surpassed $38 trillion as of late October 2025. This marks a significant milestone reflecting rapid growth in the debt, including a $1 trillion increase in just over two months from mid-August to late October 2025. The debt now exceeds the entire U.S. economy’s annual output, with the debt-to-GDP ratio at about 119% as of mid-2025.3 Servicing that debt consumes an ever-growing share of the federal budget. Congress finds it politically easier to borrow than to negotiate trade-offs. Every year of delay makes the eventual adjustment more painful—but the incentives reward delay. A KPI framework would reward lawmakers for reducing the primary deficit, stabilizing the debt-to-GDP ratio, lowering interest costs as a share of revenue, and increasing the portion of federal spending directed toward long-term investment rather than consumption.
Monetary Policy: Washington’s Hidden Incentive to Rely on Easy Money.
Fiscal irresponsibility does not exist in isolation. Congress has learned to rely on monetary expansion to absorb the consequences of its inaction. When deficits soar or crises hit, the Federal Reserve becomes the stabilizer of last resort—lowering rates, expanding liquidity, or purchasing assets to prevent collapse. This creates a perverse incentive loop: Congress overspends → The Fed stabilizes → Inflation rises → Real debt shrinks → And Congress avoids accountability again. A KPI framework must incorporate multi-year price stability benchmarks, reducing Congress’s incentive to rely on monetary expansion as a political escape valve. It would reward lawmakers for building a fiscal foundation that does not depend on endless liquidity, low interest rates, or deferred consequences.
Entitlements: The Political “Third Rail” Congress Refuses to Touch. Social Security and Medicare are promises made across generations, but their trust funds face undeniable shortfalls. Trustees warn the country every year, yet Congress refuses to act. One party accuses the other of plotting “cuts.” The other insists any new revenue is unacceptable. The safest political choice is paralysis.
A KPI system would reward lawmakers for extending the solvency of the trust funds, improving efficiency, reducing waste, and stabilizing the worker-to-beneficiary ratio without harming vulnerable retirees.
Productivity, growth and the AI Revolution. Productivity is the quiet engine of rising living standards, yet it has been declining for decades. Congress has allowed the pillars of growth workforce participation, affordable childcare, housing supply, infrastructure permitting to become snarled in political stalemate. Lawmakers are rarely rewarded for fixing slow, technical bottlenecks that lift productivity because the political payoff is low. This challenge is now magnified by the rise of artificial intelligence. AI promises explosive gains in productivity and new economic frontiers, but it also threatens large segments of middle-class and even white-collar work. Without guardrails, retraining pathways, or forward-looking investment, AI’s benefits will flow to a narrow slice of the economy. Congress has the power to shape whether AI becomes a rising tide or a destabilizing force, yet the incentives today reward sound bites about “protecting jobs” rather than meaningful policy. A KPI system would change that. It would reward lawmakers for real improvements in productivity, regulatory modernization, workforce expansion, and AI preparedness — the pillars of a healthy, adaptive economy. AI will either accelerate inequality or become the tool that rebuilds the middle class. The outcome depends on governance. A performance-based Congress would have the incentive to manage technological transition responsibly, support worker retraining, modernize education, ensure fair competition, and expand economic opportunity where it is most at risk.
Inequality, mobility decline, and the political vulnerability of a shrinking middle class. Stagnant wages, declining upward mobility, and widening inequality weaken the entire republic. When people feel their economic prospects disappearing, they become vulnerable to political manipulation. The shrinking middle class is not just an economic problem. It is a civic vulnerability. Inequality fuels resentment, resentment fuels polarization, and polarization fuels culture-war distractions that crowd out real problem-solving. Congress avoids these issues because addressing them requires contentious decisions on taxes, education, housing, and regional investment. The political risks are high. The incentives point toward blame, not solutions. A KPI-driven model flips that dynamic. It would reward reductions in child poverty, gains in median wealth for lower-income households, improvements in mobility across income quintiles, and expanded access to affordable housing in regions where jobs are growing. These are not abstract ideals — they are measurable outcomes of a society where the middle class is recovering rather than collapsing.
Health care: a massive driver of national insolvency. Health care spending accounts for nearly 18% of GDP. Every year, lawmakers hold hearings, release reports, and express outrage, but nothing changes because health care reform is politically radioactive. Any attempt to restrain costs is framed as rationing. Any attempt to expand access is framed as socialism. As a result, Congress allows the system to drift toward insolvency. A KPI-driven system would reverse these incentives, rewarding lawmakers for slowing cost growth, improving outcomes, and expanding primary care progress that benefits both citizens and the federal balance sheet.
These domains (debt, monetary policy, entitlements, productivity, inequality, and health care) are not separate crises. They reveal the same structural flaw: Congress is incentivized to avoid real solutions.
A KPI-based system reverses that logic. It rewards what strengthens the nation and penalizes what weakens it. It makes fiscal courage financially rational and negligence politically costly.
Economic KPIs tell us whether the nation’s systems are solvent and can endure. But solvency is not strength. A country can balance its books and still fail if its people are sick, unsafe, uneducated, or locked out of opportunity.
A healthy nation requires systems that work and people who thrive.
That is why a second pillar is essential.
Pillar two. Social KPIs that protect the vulnerable.
If solvency is the backbone of a functioning nation, humanity is its soul. A society cannot call itself strong if its people are suffering, fearful, or locked out of opportunity. We cannot measure national health by fiscal charts alone. We must measure the lived experience of the Americans who are most exposed to hardship, instability, and neglect.
For decades, Congress has treated these human issues as political weapons, not national responsibilities. Election Reform, Health care, education, poverty, safety, immigration, and even the environment have been absorbed into the culture wars, useful for rallying donors and inflaming base voters, but lethal to bipartisan problem-solving. The incentives make it safer to fight than to fix.
“Unrig” the Political Industrial Complex. This topic is at the heart of everything I’ve written about in this Substack. I would be remiss if this wasn’t included as one of our most meaningful KPIs. We must break the duopoly. Taxation without representation is not a relic of 1776 it is the lived reality of millions of Americans today. In much of the country, closed party primaries decide who holds office. These primaries are funded by taxpayers, yet independent voters, who now constitute the largest single bloc of voters in many states (40-45%), are barred from participating. In many districts, the primary is the election; the general is merely a formality. In fact, 8% of eligible voters elected 83% of the U.S. House. This is the modern form of taxation without representation: Citizens pay for elections that effectively choose their representatives, but they are not allowed to participate in them. The bipartisan Let America Vote Act (LAVA) recognizes this democratic defect. Introduced in July 2024 by Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick, Jared Golden, Andrew Garbarino, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, the bill would require that every eligible voter, including unaffiliated independents, be permitted to vote in taxpayer-funded primaries. States that refuse would lose federal funding; states that comply would receive transitional assistance. LAVA strikes directly at the mechanism by which political parties lock voters out of meaningful participation while relying on those same voters’ tax dollars. It is one of the clearest attempts to restore genuine representation in half a century. Unite America Executive Director Nick Troiano issued the following statement in support of the bill:
By abolishing closed primaries nationwide, the Let America Vote Act represents the single greatest expansion of voting rights in a half-century, since the Twenty-sixth Amendment lowered the voting age in 1971. At a time when a majority of voters identify as independent –– including a majority of veterans who fought for our country and a majority of young people who are the future of our country — it’s unconscionable that closed primaries deny nearly 24 million unaffiliated Americans the right to vote in taxpayer-funded elections this year. This Act would end taxation without representation once and for all, and ensure every voter, regardless of party, can fully exercise their right to vote.
Given that the most basic right of a citizen is the right to vote, it should concern you that LAVA is not a legislative priority and it has languished since it was introduced. This must become the law of the land. If we want to take our country back, we must end the closed primary system. But LAVA alone is not sufficient to achieve fair and proportionate representation. Our political system remains structurally rigged in favor of party insiders who control fundraising pipelines, candidate selection, and the machinery of reelection. To fully realign incentives and make any KPI system truly effective, additional reforms must be incorporated:
One Unified, Open Primary: Political parties can still hold private endorsement contests, but every taxpayer-funded primary should be open to all citizens.
Independent Redistricting: Standardized, non-partisan redistricting commissions must end gerrymandering and the creation of “safe seats,” making every seat genuinely contested.
Public Financing of Campaigns: Expanding public campaign financing especially through small-donor matching is not just a proven strategy for boosting candidate autonomy and reducing dependency on party fundraising pipelines. In states like Maine and Alaska, “Clean Elections” programs have enabled more grassroots and community-based candidates to compete, regardless of access to major donor networks or PACs. Recent reforms in Maine, such as strict limits on outside spending and foreign money bans, demonstrate how public financing can directly improve trust and competition.
However, full realization of these benefits requires systemic change at the national level. The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision allows unlimited outside spending from corporations, unions, and wealthy individuals, fueling the rise of super PACs and “dark money” in federal campaigns. This avalanche of outside money often overwhelms public financing efforts, diluting the influence of ordinary voters and making it harder for publicly funded candidates to compete on equal terms. That’s why a comprehensive reform agenda like the one championed by American Promise and others includes not only expanded public financing but also a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and restore Congress’s authority to limit political spending and increase transparency. Only by ending unlimited outside spending and guaranteeing real campaign finance limits can public financing programs empower candidates to run competitive campaigns focused on voters, not donors. This action would help restore political equality and meaningful representation nationwide, ensuring that the voices of citizens are not drowned out by the unchecked influence of powerful interests.
Ranked-Choice Voting: Alongside open primaries discussed above, ranked-choice voting empowers voters to rank candidates, breaks the dominance of negative partisanship, plurality voting and encourages broader coalitions.
Automatic Voter Registration: Linking AVR with open primaries increases voter rolls and turnout, particularly among young and unaffiliated citizens.
Enhanced Voter Education: Federal grants for comprehensive civic education ensure voters understand their expanded rights and options, strengthening informed turnout.
Transparency and Accountability: Strict reporting on all campaign and party funding and privacy protections for unaffiliated voters—reinforces trust and clarity.
Anti-Suppression Protections: National standards for equitable vote-by-mail access, consistent post-election audits, and bans on discriminatory voter purges secure the broadest possible participation.
Modernize our Election Infrastructure: To make voting both easier and more secure, launch phased pilots of blockchain-based digital voting. Early pilots and experiments have been conducted in Estonia and limited U.S. jurisdictions, though many security experts remain skeptical that such systems can be deployed at scale without new risks. If, and only if, the technology matures with broad, independent security validation, it could eventually become one of several tools to make voting more accessible.
These reforms are not theoretical. In states like Alaska, California, Maine, and Colorado, combinations of open primaries, independent redistricting, public financing, ranked-choice voting, and robust voter education programs have already increased competition, broadened participation, and weakened insider party dominance. Integrating blockchain voting pilots will future-proof these advances, making it easier than ever to vote securely from anywhere. Nationally scaled, this KPI would fulfill the most basic promise of a republic: those who pay for government have a real say in who governs them and confidence that their vote is secure, accessible, and counted exactly as cast.
Health and Wellbeing: The Crisis We Debate but Rarely Solve. America struggles with preventable chronic diseases, maternal mortality disparities, mental health breakdowns, and an addiction crisis that has ravaged entire regions. Yet these issues have been politicized into ideological stand-offs: “government takeover” versus “heartless capitalism.” As a result, prevention remains underfunded, communities suffer, and political incentives reward outrage rather than outcomes. Social KPIs would measure whether lawmakers reduce preventable hospitalizations, improve maternal outcomes, expand primary and mental health care access, and reduce overdose deaths. These are measurable outcomes tracked by federal agencies today — yet Congress has no incentive to improve them. A KPI system would finally make compassion measurable, not rhetorical.
Education: The Mobility Engine Congress Has Allowed to Stall. Education is ground zero for the American Dream, yet it has become one of the most toxic battlegrounds of the culture wars. Instead of focusing on literacy, math proficiency, early childhood development, vocational training, or high school graduation, Congress spends its energy fighting about library books, ideological content, and local culture-war skirmishes. Meanwhile students fall further behind. Social KPIs would reward genuine progress: rising reading and math scores, shrinking achievement gaps, higher completion rates, better early childhood access, and expansion of technical pathways. These metrics exist. Congress simply has no incentive to prioritize them. KPIs would reorient cultural conflict back toward educational outcomes.
Economic Mobility & Inequality: The Slow Erosion of the American Dream. Childhood poverty remains stubbornly high. Household wealth for the bottom half of the country has barely moved in decades. Upward mobility is lower than in almost every other advanced economy. But Congress avoids these issues because every proposed solution risks triggering ideological backlash: one side frames it as “redistribution,” the other as “indifference.” Social KPIs would measure actual movement: reductions in child poverty, increases in median wealth for low-income families, higher rates of mobility between income quintiles, and expanded access to affordable housing in growing regions. These outcomes matter more than slogans, and they are trackable with existing federal data.
Community Safety & Social Stability: Where Fear Replaces Freedom. Rising homicide rates in certain cities, stubborn property crime, and frayed relationships between communities and law enforcement create a national atmosphere of fear and distrust. Yet Congress prefers to weaponize these issues — “soft on crime,” “racist policing” — rather than fix them. Social KPIs would reward reduced violent crime, improved police-community trust, lower recidivism, better re-entry outcomes, and investment in prevention. These are measurable, apolitical indicators of community health. Instead of punishing cooperation, the system would reward it.
Civic Health & Democratic Trust: A Nation Cannot Function When Its People Hate Each Other. Polarization is no longer just disagreement. It is dehumanization. Surveys show that majorities in both parties view the “other side” as immoral and a threat to the country. Trust in government is at historic lows. Voter engagement is uneven. Volunteerism is declining. Democracy rests on shared faith in institutions — and that faith is collapsing. Yet Washington benefits from division. Outrage raises money. Compromise does not. Social KPIs would measure improvements in trust, participation, depolarization, and civic engagement. The goal is not ideological harmony. It is democratic resilience. These KPIs would reward leaders for calming the temperature rather than raising it.
Immigration: A Human Crisis Locked in a Political Cage Match. Immigration is a federal responsibility, yet border security and asylum reform have been held hostage to partisan warfare for decades. The humanitarian crises at the border and the legal backlogs in the asylum system are not inevitable — they are the direct result of a system where both parties benefit more from fighting than from fixing. Social KPIs would reward faster asylum adjudication, reduced illegal crossings through legal pathways and targeted enforcement, more efficient visa processing, and better migrant integration outcomes. Congress would finally have an incentive to solve immigration rather than weaponize it.
Environmental Stability & Public Health: A Risk, Not a Culture War. Climate and environmental issues have been reduced to ideological identity markers rather than treated as public safety risks. Communities face polluted air and water, failing infrastructure, wildfires, droughts, and flooding that destroy homes and livelihoods. Yet federal action is hamstrung because the policy space has been turned into a culture-war battlefield. Social KPIs would measure reduced pollution exposure in vulnerable communities, stronger infrastructure resilience, lower disaster losses, and stable, reliable energy capacity. This is not about ideology. It is about risk management. Washington would finally be rewarded for mitigation, not for tribal posturing.
All of these domains suffer from the same structural problem: Congress has no incentive to solve them. It only has incentives to fight about them.
These Social KPIs would reverse that.
They would reward lawmakers for progress, not posturing. For outcomes, not outrage. For service, not culture-war theatrics.
A KPI system that rewards only financial discipline would be immoral. A KPI system that rewards only compassion without discipline would be irresponsible. A system that rewards both — fiscal solvency and human wellbeing — would be transformative.
Skeptics will warn that measuring concepts like “upward mobility,” “trust,” or “vulnerability” is subjective. They will argue that politicians will cherry-pick metrics or claim progress where none exists. Others will note that many levers affecting housing, education, and social outcomes sit with states and localities, not Washington.
These are fair critiques. The answer is not to abandon social KPIs. It is to anchor them in datasets that already exist:
Upward mobility → Census Bureau longitudinal studies
Child poverty → Supplemental Poverty Measure
Educational outcomes → NAEP, NCES
Civic trust → long-running survey series
Health and mortality → CDC
Crime → DOJ / BJS
Environmental risk → EPA, FEMA
Immigration system performance → DHS and DOJ
These indicators are widely accepted, consistently measured, and resistant to political manipulation. Washington may not directly control all inputs, but it shapes funding, rules, incentives, and national priorities. Those levers matter.
The federal government cannot control everything.
But it can reward what strengthens the nation and penalize what weakens it.
Incentives determine outcomes. For decades, Congress has been rewarded for conflict rather than competence, performance rather than progress. KPIs change that. They pay for patriotism, not partisanship. For results, not rhetoric. For the future, not the grift. If we want a government capable of solving the hardest problems in front of us, we must build a system that rewards those who solve them.
Implementation Challenges
Implementation of this approach (e.g. setting pay, KPIs, lobbying bans, and strict ethics oversight etc.) is exceptionally difficult.
The essence of the challenge is self-interest: lawmakers must be persuaded to cede private enrichment for structured, transparent, above-board compensation. Success elsewhere such as Singapore’s parliamentary reforms or Finland’s transparency standards was made possible in much smaller, more cohesive polities, often coupled with high public trust.
In the US, resistance is formidable, and recent reform attempts (e.g. open primaries, national RCV, lobbyist bans etc.) have failed at the ballot box even when polling high.
But because it’s hard, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
The Political Bargain
Within the U.S. constitutional framework, the salaries for members of Congress are determined by Congress itself through legislation it enacts, as specified in Article I, Section 6 of the Constitution, which states that Senators and Representatives “shall receive a Compensation for their Services, to be ascertained by Law, and paid out of the Treasury of the United States.” This means Congress passes laws setting its own pay levels, which then require presidential approval (or override of a veto) to become effective, as with any federal law. However, the 27th Amendment adds a key restriction: No law varying congressional compensation can take effect until after an intervening election of Representatives, preventing immediate self-serving raises. In practice, this has led to periodic adjustments via specific bills or automatic mechanisms (like cost-of-living adjustments, though these have been frozen or limited in recent years).
Given this constitutional reality, the most direct path, is to lobby congress and try to introduce and pass legislation making “Conscious Governance” the law of the land. This path should be pursued as it represents the most expeditious way to effectuate this plan and change direction. The risk with this approach is that Congress could attempt to pass a law that increases its own salaries with none of the accountability mechanisms thereby taking the reward without the responsibility. That risk cannot be ignored. Any statutory approach would require extraordinary public pressure and explicit safeguards to prevent Congress from enacting raises without the accompanying accountability framework. The political class could embrace the upside of more money and quietly discard the guardrails that make the proposal worth pursuing. I think that risk is low.
But, if it’s determined that the risk is too great, the alternative path is far more challenging: the way to make this system legitimate, enforceable, and corruption-proof is to constitutionalize it. Here we must confront feasibility honestly. Amending the Constitution requires two-thirds of Congress and ratification by three-quarters of the states. Under ordinary circumstances, that would be impossible. But this reform is somewhat unique because it contains something no other reform has ever offered: the political class stands to benefit financially if they agree to restrain themselves.
This creates a rare political bargain.
Lawmakers receive substantial, performance-based compensation guaranteed, legal, and far more predictable than the current web of donor dependence in exchange for permanently surrendering the private enrichment pipelines that have defined Washington culture for decades. The system protects the public by eliminating stock trading, banning lobbying, enforcing transparency, and invoking automatic removal for corruption. And it protects the lawmakers by replacing all of that with a clean, legal, above-board form of compensation tied to national performance.
Why would sitting Representatives and Senators vote to eliminate their own private revenue streams? Because the new revenue stream would be designed to be financially superior to the current system of grift and it’s all above board! It is the only reform where self-interest and public interest intersect.
Critics will object that money alone cannot uncapture Congress that donors, activists, ideological pressure, and social identity will still influence behavior. And they are right. A performance-compensation model cannot rewrite human nature. But it can change the cost structure of corruption and the reward structure of courage. It gives lawmakers a financial incentive to defy their party when the country needs them to. It creates a counterweight to donor pressure that does not exist today.
This proposal does not rely on selflessness. It does not rely on courage. It relies on something far more dependable: a system in which self-interest finally aligns with national interest.
The Call for a New System of National Leadership
This is not an academic exercise. It is about survival. The United States is facing a convergence of economic, social, and political pressures that cannot be solved with the current incentive structure. The system is too captured. The parties are too entrenched. The grift is too easy.
We need a model that pays elected officials well, but only when they serve the nation well. We need a model that rewards outcomes that expand opportunity, reduce suffering, and protect future generations. We need a model that gives lawmakers the courage to defy their parties and the freedom to act on conscience.
This is what conscious capitalism would look like in Congress. It is not ideological. It is structural. It is moral. It is economically rational. And it is the only way to realign the incentives of public office with the interests of the American people.
Pay for patriotism, not party.
Pay for results, not rhetoric.
Pay for the future, not the grift.
The stakes could not be higher. The alternative is the slow collapse of a nation that once believed it was exceptional. The time for half measures is over. The time for structural reform is now.
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In 2024, we rallied to “unrig” the system. Organizations around the country spent hundreds of millions of dollars to sponsor citizens’ initiatives to enact reform. Voters in multiple states decided on electoral-system changes, with nine measures aimed at altering existing systems and several additional votes to ban or modify ranked-choice voting (RCV) or open primary structures. Missouri approved an amendment banning RCV (with an exception for St. Louis), while states such as Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Montana, and South Dakota rejected proposals to adopt or expand RCV or related reforms. Alaska narrowly rejected repealing its top-four primaries and RCV system. Unfortunately, the overall results reflected a national pattern in which many reform efforts failed to gain voter approval, even as some jurisdictions moved to constrain or repeal alternative voting methods already in place. Across the nine major reform measures, more than 6.6 million voters cast ballots in favor of electoral reform proposals, a meaningful show of support that forced a national conversation and generated unprecedented earned media. Yet we faced ferocious and well-funded opposition from the political establishment. Analyses highlighted common barriers to reform, including perceived voter confusion about new voting mechanisms, political polarization, and the difficulty of achieving bipartisan consensus on changes to the election system. Beyond these ballot initiatives, one Florida resident, Michael Polelle, made it all the way to the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court denied his petition for a writ of certiorari in Polelle v. Cord Byrd, meaning it declined to hear a case challenging Florida’s closed primary system on the grounds it violates both the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
According to Gallup, approval of Congress recently fell as low as 15 percent. And yet: incumbent members continue to win reelection at over 90 percent. The institution is widely disapproved of, but reelects nearly the same people every cycle. That speaks less to individual virtue and more to a system whose structure protects incumbents, shields them from accountability, and rewards staying over solving. It is no wonder Congress is a magnet not for nation-builders, but for people willing to accept low public pay because they know the real money lies elsewhere.
If you include hidden foreign-exchange (FX) liabilities and off-balance-sheet obligations along with the official national debt, recent estimates highlight as much as $65 trillion in off-the-books dollar debt held in foreign exchange markets by non-U.S. institutions, according to Bank for International Settlements (BIS) research. This hidden dollar debt arises from FX swaps, forwards, and similar instruments, and while not a direct U.S. government liability, it creates systemic dollar exposures that can become relevant in periods of crisis because the U.S. Federal Reserve often acts as the lender of last resort for the global dollar system. When factoring in other off-balance-sheet U.S. government obligations, such as the present value of unfunded Social Security and Medicare liabilities, some analyses place the “total” U.S. government debt and obligation burden at around $103 trillion as of 2021, or over 400% of GDP. This figure includes explicit debt, unfunded entitlements, and estimated off-balance FX-related exposure.