I only-kinda-jokingly say that I'd be willing to be the sacrifice and get a second mortgage on my house if it could buy the entire nation some new rights.

Our politicians routinely sell out smaller issues for "downpayment in a coastal metro" level of money. It's just about within reach of a middle-class urban adult to directly fund with some personal sacrifices.

I feel like we like to imagine that these corporations are budgeting big-bucks to bribe/lobby politicians, because they have more money than most humans can actually mentally picture, but their budgets are often closer to a small team of software engineers' salary. Meta spend ~$25M on all lobbying last year - and they're the top corporate spender. That's under 1 hours of revenue for them.

In that case, maybe it would make sense for regular people to create their own PACs. Like a privacy PAC. Pay for lobbyists who are more persuasive than our angry emails.

As they say, freedom ain’t free.

Watch out though because many of those revelations are bogus and only look at how much money people lobbying for a position donated to some member of Congress who voted for that position. They fail to look up how much money people lobbying against that position donated to that same member of Congress.

Often times it is about the same amount, which means you cannot infer that the money influenced the vote.

Some do it right, but enough do not that unless you know you are getting the information from one of the ones who does it right you really need to check for yourself.

I believe $50-100k

> One of the things I have found so alarming about a lot of recent revelations is just how cheap congress goes for.

The executive branch is also available for relatively bargain basement prices!

Ask us about our unlimited pardoning power for federal offenses!

#Ad #WorldLibertyFinancial

Yes, apparently there are crowdfunded superpacs exactly for this purpose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayday_PAC

DSA?

Better to spend money on helping our neighbors than going around the world murdering people

You’re confusing free to the user with free to the government. Those are all great examples of things which make huge differences in the lives of the people who need them while having no meaningful impact on taxpayers (forget Jeff Bezos, none of us would significantly change our lives if we paid for childcare or housing out of general fund revenue, and that’s before you factor in how much money we’d save getting better treatment with universal healthcare — every time I’ve done the math comparing us with Denmark, it’s been roughly even once you factor in how much we pay for insurance).

Part of how you can tell it’s not the cost motivating opposition is that this concern is never applied to defense spending.

On the healthcare front it’s not even a question. We are already paying via insurance and deductibles and copays etc. W2s don’t see most of the cost because their company pays it.

Yet we apparently have money for military parades and wars and ballrooms. Go figure.

Exactly. Giving people free stuff is extremely popular. If people actually want those things, we can collective open our wallets and pay for it. But that changes people's opinions quite radically.

> The problem is that those things are not really "free" because somebody else needs to pay for them.

This line of thinking is exactly why America is sliding backwards.

It is not a problem to pay for things provide a net benefit to society.

"Somebody else needs to pay for" warmongering, too, yet there's nowhere near as much hand-wringing about how "somebody else needs to pay for them".

This is such a straw man argument. Consider health care.

The US spends by far the most per-capita on health care of any OECD country [1]. It's roughly 50% more than the number 2 on the list, which is Switzerland, a notoriously expensive country. Yet (almost?) every other country on that list has universal healthcare. Yet life expectancy is lower than Costa Rica [2] and generally health outcomes are worse in the US than most OECD nations.

So providing universal healthcare would actually be cheaper overall but it would destroy a health insurance companies, which are nothing more than parasitic rent-seekers. There would be less spending per capita but a lot of that spending would be made by the government rather than companies. So you'd need to tax to cover that cost, which would be significant, but it would be overall cheaper.

Now consider housing. We treat it as a speculative investment rather than something to provide shelter. There is absolutely no reason for it to be as expensive as it is. All we're doing is a massive wealth transfer from the young and poor to the old and rich. Yet we, as a society, choose to prioritize landlord and speculator profits over people, quite literally, dying in the street.

Food? We produce an abundance of food, more than we can eat. There is absolutely no reason anyone should go hungry in any OECD nation, ever. We destroy food to protect profits.

As for income, people generally want to be paid enough to live on, something that's becomign increasingly difficult. And again, we choose minting billionaires at a stupendous rate (and now trillionaires) over paying people a living wage.

[1]: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/11/health-at-a-gla...

[2]: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/11/health-at-a-gla...