WHY I’M NOT RUNNING FOR CONGRESS
by James Altucher
This week I was going to announce I was running
for Congress. I was taking it very seriously and
for the past three months this was the week I was planning on announcing.
I had hired people to run the campaign. I had
gotten great advice. I had studied the current
incumbent in my district. I had spoken to party
officials in BOTH parties who were receptive. I
had spoken to local reporters who were going to cover it.
I was even going through the process of being
endorsed by a major national politician. I
learned a lot. What I learned convinced me I
couldn’t run and still be true to my values.
The best way to have a difference in the world is
to just do what I do now. The best way to clean a
dark room is to open the window and let the light in. That’s what I like to do.
But within three seconds of thinking about
running for Congress I learned an enormous amount
about the bullshit in the system. Below I tell
the story of almost instantly being thrown into
the machine where I would have to give up my principles.
Some of what I learned is below. Some I just have to keep to myself for now.
Tactical Things I Learned:
A) For a mid-term Congressional primary, you
will win if you only campaign in nursing homes.
Every primary campaign is won by senior citizens
as the swing votes. So if you just campaign in
nursing homes and make sure that vans are
available to get them to vote, then you win.
People think that you have to win over young
people but in primaries it’s the reverse.
B) People remember the names of who they donate
to. “The trick is,” said one experienced
marketerr, “is to raise just a dollar from
everyone.” The second best thing, he said, “is to give a dollar to everyone”.
C) I was going to try something creative. It’s
easy to get a list of likely voters in your
district. I was simply going to buy the vanity
searches of all of those people on Google. Since
most people search their name, if I blanket their
screen (and their Facebook pages) with my name,
then they would remember it at voting time. “What
we do,” said my favorite marketer (author of the
one million in sales book, “How to Run a
Successful Hot Dog Cart”, Perry Belcher), “is to
make the ads really ugly so nobody clicks. So you
get the effect you want but it costs you no
money”. I bet nobody has thought of this before for a campaign.
D) I felt I could win. The incumbent was weak and
has already signed up to raise money from PACs
that cater to weak incumbents. I also studied his
voting record and found weak holes. The bottom
line is that a large percentage of the people who
have voted for him have lost their jobs and now
have worse healthcare. Nor does he actually live
in the district. I’ve lived here for most of 11 years.
E) Even though I’m pretty apolitical, I felt very
strongly about my particular issues. “But,” said
another marketing expert, “if you actually say
any of this stuff nobody will take your campaign
seriously. So you have to rewrite it completely.”
I have a 10,000 word platform. I sent it to him.
“yeah,” he said, “nobody is going to take you
seriously and you won’t be able to win.” I agree with him.
My feeling is, if I can’t run on what I believe
in then what’s the point? I had a lot of issues
(10,000 words was just the start. I could’ve
written a 50,000 word platform) but here are some of my ideas.
Some of my Issues:
- Congressmen should NOT be allowed to vote in
Washington DC. The only reason they vote there is
because there were no phone lines or Internet in
1792. But now Congressmen could stay in their
district, help people out, and still engage in
debates and learn the issues and vote from home. The benefits:
1. stay closer to constituents and what they want.
2. Most important: it would destroy the hundred
billion dollar lobbying/bribery industry.
Congressmen basically vote what industry
lobbyists want them to vote. Lobbyists have an
easy job. All of the Congressmen are located in
one small city. It’s easy to wine and dine them
ten times a day. If the Congressmen were spread
out over the entire country by mandate, then
there would be no way to lobby them. End of
lobbying industry. More true democracy for
voters. In fact, it might even mean the end of
Congress, since voters could vote directly and we
can have a true democracy instead of a pretend one.
- No more “military actions”. In the past four
years we’ve had military actions in at least six
different countries and conducted over 20,000
airstrikes, killing many innocent civilians . I’m
not sure what good they do. The last LEGALLY
declared war was in 1941. Most wars in history
have had an economic cause. If we got creative
on the economics, we wouldn’t need to send over
young 18 year old boys and girls to die pointless deaths that protect nobody.
18 year olds have their senior prom and then they
die. Not to mention our lack of nation-building
upon completion of a military action. I support
the charity “Women for Women International” which
helps women whose lives and families have been
torn apart by military actions in Iraq,
Afghanistan, all over Africa, etc. I also support
successful technologies that help diagnose
returning veterans with post-traumatic stress
syndrome as to what medication will most
effectively cure their issues. These 18 year old
kids are having their lives destroyed.
When I ask my 40 year old friends who disagree
with me on this issue if they would volunteer for
the military in order to relieve an 18 year old, nobody says “I’ll do it”.
- Economics stops wars. I can give 100 examples.
But in Rwanda we sent over billions in military
aid. None of it worked to prevent genocide in the
90s. Do you know what worked? The price of coffee
is perfectly correlated to the genocidal violence
in Rwanda. When Starbucks bought coffee from
Rwanda: no more genocide (this is overly
simplified but actually true). The entire Middle
East situation is going to change simply because
we have more oil in North Dakota and the
Mississippi Lime than the entire Middle East.
Let’s let that play out in environmentally safe
ways now that the technology is finally here and getting better.
- Senior citizens are being systematically
starved and killed by the government. Social
security rises with core inflation, which
excludes food and energy increases. Well, food
and energy costs have been increasing faster than
inflation for many years. So senior citizens get
less money each year to cater to their basic needs. And they are living longer.
My calculations are they have about ten years
before a senior citizen with no other means of
support will starve to death. Solution: we have
to live up to our promise to people over 65. But
anyone younger than 55 should give up their
expectations of Social Security (since it won’t
help them live anyway). People should keep
working. There’s really no other choice. The
retirement age where people get Social Security
was set at 65 in a year when the average person
died at age 61. Now it’s 78. So the world has changed.
- Every government asset (State and Federal)
should be sold. Why do states own horrible
universities, for instance, that rob our children
of their youth and put them into horrible debt,
and then the Federal government backs that debt. Sell the universities.
Sell the highways. Sell the bridges (they are all
about to fall apart since the average lifespan of
a bridge is about 50 years old and most bridges
were built in the 1930s and 40s.) Sell the poorly run post office. Etc.
I’m not suggesting this because the government is
horrible at running things. But, yeah, given our
debt, I guess they are. So let’s run a surplus by
simply selling everything, hiring less government
employees (who will move over into private
industry that buys the assets), and making enough
money to pay down debt before inflation starts
paying down our debt. There’s not really any
other solution since government is incapable of
reducing budgets (we only run surpluses when
business is booming). And if companies that buy
these assets want to make a profit they won’t let
them collapse like the bridge above.
A great example of an organization that should be
sold off is NASA. A $100 billion budget couldn’t
get a a commercial vehicle into space but a $10
million X Prize was able to. There’s more
details here but there is a lot to be
learned from the success of incentives funded by private industry.
- Sales tax. No income tax. Let’s face it: rich
people don’t pay income taxes. They never have
and they never will. Rich people make money on
capital gains which has lower taxes and more
loopholes. It’s people who are forced to go to a
nine to five job (lower class, middle class,
upper middle class) that get screwed on income taxes.
People say (because they’ve been trained by their
masters) that “if you replace an income tax with
a sales tax” then it becomes a regressive tax
against the poor. This is horseshit. The
state-sponsored lottery is a tax against the poor.
A sales tax punishes people who consume. The last
I saw, rich people consume a lot more than poor
people and pay no taxes while they do it. You
want to keep an income tax for people making
over $200,000 (an arbitrary number that should be
modified by state), then fine. But lets get rid
of the worst tax and replace it with the one tax
that everyone except the fabulously wealthy would
be willing to pay. And since the government will
own less and operate more efficiently, there will
be less need for exorbitant tax revenues to fund
military actions and military aid that produces zero results.
- No FDA. The FDA approves the drugs you take to
live if you have diseases like cancer, etc. It
takes almost $2 billion to get a drug past the
FDA AFTER the R&D costs that made the drug. And
yet, still these drugs don’t work, they cause
deaths, and many good drugs are rejected by the FDA for nonsense reasons.
I can give examples but suffice to say I’ve seen
this 100 times over. And then the problem is: the
drugs have to price out of this world ($20,000 a
month to take many life-saving cancer drugs)
because of the high costs of getting through the
FDA. Hence also the enormous lobbying from the
pharma industry to make back the costs.
At the very least, test for safety, and then pass
the drugs. Then the market will decide instead of
the lobbyists and well-paid pharma salesmen
deciding. Will it result in more deaths from bad
drugs? No more than exists now. Will it result in
better healthcare? Yes, because drugs will be
cheaper and we’ll learn a lot more quickly which
are the bad ones and which are the good ones.
Will the government save money? Yes, because the
war on drugs will end. Will it result in more
jobs? Yes, because more companies will be able to
start actively selling drugs instead of competing
with bigger and better capitalized pharma companies.
These are just a few of the issues. There are
many more. I had issues that nobody would like
(stop backing housing mortgages. Stop backing
student loans.) This would rein in the cost of
houses. This would rein in the cost of tuitions
if colleges could no longer rely on the
government to pay their professors/researches
salaries. The net result would be that the best
scientists would work in private industry instead
and young people would have less debt to deal with when starting their career.
I would also do a blanket forgiveness of student
debt – paid for, in part, by states selling off
all universities to private industry). I would
also change the capital requirements for banks to
lend out money, force them to reveal their
financial ratings (little known secret: it’s
actually a Federal felony for a bank employee to
actually tell you if it’s on the verge of going
out of business even if you are about to put all
of your money there), and allow banks to
refinance your underwater mortgages with current interest rates. And so on.
So why didn’t I run?
Part I – CRAZY
Everyone thought I was crazy. And they were
right. A marketing expert read my platform and
said, “nobody is going to take you seriously and
you’d have to run as an independent and then you would lose.”
He was totally right. And why run if I had no
chance to win. “A vanity play,” he called it. Just a waste of money.
Part II – THE BULLSHIT
I began discussions with a major politician who
was thinking of endorsing me. He passed me off to
a low campaign official. This guy wrote to me and
said, “We can’t back losers. You have to do two things:
1) show us the mathematical path to victory
2) prove that you can raise the money. ”
And then he said, ominously, “and then there’s other concerns.”
#2 was no problem but #1 I didn’t know even what
that meant. I had a unique strategy that I felt could win.
“Hire our pollster.”
So I started talking to the pollster. World
famous successful pollster. I didn’t know what he
was going to do. Nobody knows who I am in my
district. Yet. The incumbent didn’t even live in
the district when he started running here (and still doesn’t).
The pollster was very nice and we spoke many
times. I learned a lot talking to him. But he
said, “we just need to figure out what your
district thinks so you can construct your message
in such a way that they vote for you.”
I didn’t understand. How about I construct my
message based on what I think and then they can
decide if they like my issues and THEN vote for me?
There were other issues. My initial contact even
said, “there are other factors involved.” I found
out the other factor. They wanted to know if I
would then support a certain candidate for President.
I suddenly felt like I was no longer choosing
myself. I was getting anxious about other people
choosing/endorsing me and I had to jump through
weird hoops I didn’t agree with to make it happen.
I don’t like that in any part of my
life.<http://www.amazon.com/Choose-Yourself-ebook/dp/B00CO8D3G4/ref=zg_bs_tab_pd_bsnr_3?tag=vglnkc7991-20>
That’s what my entire book is about.
So I was in politics for basically three seconds
and suddenly I was being thrown into a bullshit machine.
Part III – CLAUDIA
Claudia said, “this will be stressful and if you
win I don’t want to live in Washington DC.”
“But,” I said, “part of my platform is that I would never go to DC.”
She looked at me. You know the look. The look
said, “stop lying to me.” The look said, “I am
not an idiot. You are going to make me live in
DC.” The look said, “and if you lose you’re going
to spend a lot of money for nothing.”
“You will be a divorced congressmen,” she said,
jokingly. But I thought about it. I didn’t like that joke.
So I’m not running.
http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2013/06/why-im-not-running-for-congress/
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