It's the type of imperfect solution we need. Currently Senator Manchin is holding up the infrastructure bill because its plans to combat the climate crisis will impact his million-dollar investments in the coal and energy industries [1].
These people should not be allowed to hold any kind of private or public stock other than ETFs of the S&P 500 index. This way you remove the conflict of interest in favoring one sector/company over another and instead if they want to make money through the market they can do so by helping the overall economy instead.
Even the S&P500 isn’t free from policy implications. For one, it would lead you to policies that favor large, incumbent companies over small cap and private companies.
(It would also be infeasible to mandate the divestiture of small, closely-held family businesses in order to hold office.)
He placed the farm into a trust rather than divesting ownership. I’m fine with that as a much more practical solution to (most of) the problem here.
He eventually sold it but only after leaving the Presidency (in large part because it was then under crushing debt, having been run by “not the people who knew and cared about the business”.)
I’d rather have us have politicians who are “like us” (who might have an LLC with a rental property in it, who own a pizza shop/dry cleaner/corner bodega, a consulting shop, etc.) than to restrict politics only to those with nothing to lose or so much to lose that if they lose some in a quest for power, it’s OK. I don’t want to shut small businesspeople out because they’ll lose everything they’ve worked to build.
We need people in government who know what it’s like to have to work to make payroll and to sign paychecks on the front.
