Politics as a future?

Hey guys,

I wanted to ask if any of you were interested in going into politics in the future.

I have been interested in politics for a really long time and I definitely see myself going into it after a career in finance. Have any of you thought about it or pursued something along these lines?

I know there is another post but it was really old and I wanted to get some fresh perspectives on this.

 

I would personally never do that, but I took a class in college about Congress that was taught by a former congressional staffer and it seemed interesting to learn about but probably stressful and occasionally really dull. The Senate's Banking, House, and Urban Affairs and House Financial Services committees would be pretty cool, not to mention something sexy like the Appropriations, Judiciary, Intelligence, Armed Services or Ways and Means committees.

Quant (ˈkwänt) n: An expert, someone who knows more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing.
 

Any reason for not wanting to go for it?

I always read way more on politics and government than I do finance and it seems so interesting. Exactly, I want to be able to make the tough decisions and serve my country. I think there is so much to politics (especially on a federal level) and actually having some power to bring change is incredible in my opinion.

 
Best Response

Don't get me wrong, it's definitely interesting, but I'm not overly convinced that politicians are always in it to serve their country. It's just a job like every other. In America especially that seems to be the case. What makes it more difficult is that it's a constant conflict and balancing act between your personal ambition, that of your constituents, your party, your personal network, and ultimately your country. It's a massive weight that isn't the easiest to manage. On top of that, a winner-take-all electoral system that exists in America has proven to make politics much more partisan and less consensus-driven, as opposed to the outcomes in most proportional representation electoral systems. Look up "DW-NOMINATE Scores with Bootstrapped Standard Errors" which is an statistical representation made by several political science professors to measure political polarization by roll call voting primarily.

That being said, I'd personally be really interested in a research support position like with the Library of Congress or something more econ focused like the Fed/FDIC/Treasury/etc.

Quant (ˈkwänt) n: An expert, someone who knows more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing.
 

I have thought about it, but I do not think it would be for me in the long run. I think it would very interesting to work with people from all around the country with differing views. However, I would not want to be in the spotlight. If you are comfy with people knowing who you are, have a clean background, care about the people you serve and agree with me ;) then you should go for it!

Only two sources I trust, Glenn Beck and singing woodland creatures.
 

Always been partially interested, sort of a fantasy deal. Not the most charismatic person however so I can't see myself playing a very public role in politics. I think working in the finance division of the government would be cool though.

 

Even though I'm not from the US I'd like to enter politics as well after (hopefully) being successful in the consulting sector for 10 to 20ish years. I've been very interested in politics for the last years and I also had a minor political position a couple of years ago. However I'm going to be politically active as of October again. It's very helpful for a good network as well.

 

In my home country. It's way easier to get into politics in Europe since you don't need money to do so. As a matter of fact, many of the top politicians from Germany (my home country) used to be in consulting.

 

A little perspective from the campaign side of politics ... Worked on a pretty big congressional last cycle and loved it. They say you get bit by the bug and it's true, there's something exciting about politics (esp. campaigning) that's hard to find elsewhere. Not sure I'll ever get that in finance. Election day with journalists and broadcast media everywhere with all the tension and the culmination of months of work is just special. Same to be said at rallies when hundreds or thousands turn out to support your candidate. GOTV is hell but also exhilarating, knowing it's so crucial really pushes you (esp if it's a candidate you believe in).

Undecided if I want to run for anything myself later on, but definitely plan to be involved in campaigns as my career permits. Although, responding to work/life balances, once you're elected there might be a nice balance, but getting there is rough. My hours on the campaign were far worse than my SA hours right now, and everyone survives off of coffee, cigs, and gas station food. Some of the hardcore political operative types would move from race to race staying with host families in whatever city they ended up in. Extreme job uncertainty and terrible pay.

 

Exactly why I got off the trail. I staffed a few Congressional, one Presidential campaign and numerous local campaigns, and the thing that stuck out to me was the hotel living and host family living was horrible. Also, you are always looking for a job, literally 24/7 looking for the next opportunity, if the campaign ends and you don't have a gig it can be brutal.

The real money is in political consulting, own a firm and run campaigns. But being a political operative type is the worst kind of life.

 

Politics is like a leech. Without your blood it would not survive.

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them." - Bruce Lee
 

Do you have prior experience as a panhandler? I hope so, because that is what most politicians spent the majority of their life doing: begging for donations. Literally, a politician spends maybe 90-95% of the year trying to raise campaign funds from special interest groups and voters and the other 5-10% actually engaged in any sort of policy formation. It is one of the reasons our political system is so dysfunctional, and why we desperately need campaign finance reform.

 

Agreed. Ranked voting and public financing of elections would vastly clean up the sewer that is American politics. Problem is, you can't force candidates to take public money and forego private financing, so the only way it could happen is if the Democrats and Republicans came to a gentlemen's agreement to not raise any private money in a campaign. But you can see the flaw here--a huge advantage of incumbency is being able to easily out-raise your competition. The moment an incumbent is threatened by an equally financed opponent and he or she panics and goes with private money is the moment the voluntary system falls apart.

Array
 

Fed in particular is great because they're not paid on the GS scale so most positions generally make more, albeit less than private sector. Doesn't mean you can't take from the magical money machine that keeps on giving. They also are fairly generous with money for academics, at least at the junior research analyst level when compared to private sector firms as far as I'm aware.

Quant (ˈkwänt) n: An expert, someone who knows more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing.
 

I honestly think most people who work for the Fed, Treasury, FDIC, and federal government in general would make less in the private sector. The vast, vast majority of these workers are paper pushers with no particular transferable skill set. For the longest time (through maybe the 1970's or 1980's) it was true that federal employees were under paid compared to the private sector. However, go to USAJobs today and look at the obscene pay scale for public sector employees and compare it to what the private sector would be willing to pay bureaucrats and paper pushers. It's not really even close. My friend at the CIA/NSA/DIA (not sure) got his brother hired at his office. He told me that his brother is totally incompetent, is off sick most of the time, and is 30 years old and just broke $100,000 in pay. He has a BA in economics from George Mason and no special skill set...

As far as the Ph.D. economists at the Fed, how many private sector companies really need them? I think most would be f*cked if the Federal Reserve suddenly couldn't employ them. There is just limited demand for that credential in the private sector.

Array
 

Trump was elected by the electoral college. Even though bankers donate big on campaigns Trump has the last word. The best politicians are non bankers that's my 2 cents.

 

The only profession that is more saturated than finance with psychos and sociopaths is politics. The political incentive structure is to literally ruin the country through debt, inflation, taxing productivity and subsidizing poor behavior.

“Elections are a futures market for stolen property”
 

I'm not going to write you a book on public choice theory but look into it. I also recommend chapter 10 in Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom." The first part of my statement is just empirically true.

“Elections are a futures market for stolen property”
 

No he is right, you can't exist in that world if you have even a shred of empathy for anyone but yourself. You can talk all you want about how you are "in in for the people" history will prove otherwise in every case.

Follow the shit your fellow monkeys say @shitWSOsays Life is hard, it's even harder when you're stupid - John Wayne
 

Well, my first reaction would be to say absolutely not after, as you stated, a very good career in finance I would probably want to trade my working lifestyle for lots of golf, networking functions etc... oh wait, that sounds like a politicians life. I can think of far worse things to have a successful career and then go do a stint in Washington, making half informed decisions on policies that effect hundreds of millions of lives, and if you screw up too much just make sure whoever tries to run against you has more skeletons than you do. Frankly, the lack of accountability is so astounding in politics that it sounds like an awesome place to be for like a term or two. The problem is that like everything else I think it ends up consuming you and you fall in love with the idea of how much power you have and simply lose whoever you were in the process.

 
Addinator:
Frankly, the lack of accountability is so astounding in politics that it sounds like an awesome place to be for like a term or two. The problem is that like everything else I think it ends up consuming you and you fall in love with the idea of how much power you have and simply lose whoever you were in the process.

This probably describes banking after a few years. I also would never run, I don't care about my skeletons but wouldn't want people harassing my family.

 
Addinator:
Well, my first reaction would be to say absolutely not after, as you stated, a very good career in finance I would probably want to trade my working lifestyle for lots of golf, networking functions etc... oh wait, that sounds like a politicians life. I can think of far worse things to have a successful career and then go do a stint in Washington, making half informed decisions on policies that effect hundreds of millions of lives, and if you screw up too much just make sure whoever tries to run against you has more skeletons than you do. Frankly, the lack of accountability is so astounding in politics that it sounds like an awesome place to be for like a term or two. The problem is that like everything else I think it ends up consuming you and you fall in love with the idea of how much power you have and simply lose whoever you were in the process.

This.

 

Being in finance and making the move to politics will probably give your opponent a good argument to tear you down...

In France with all the bad press finance people get it'd be impossible to fight back.

Associate Editor at Mergers & Inquisitions @AusartThomas
 
Thomas Ausart:
Being in finance and making the move to politics will probably give your opponent a good argument to tear you down...

In France with all the bad press finance people get it'd be impossible to fight back.

You know, i think that it does for people who are trying to toe a line that they don't necessarily believe or aren't comfortable with themselves and what they have accomplished. I think people would respect, not like, someone who comes out and says here is my record. This is what I did and I'm damn well proud of it, I've accomplished many great things and aided tons of companies, blah blah whatever you want to say. If you own your record and at least appear to believe in it that goes a very long way. Sure, people may still not vote for you but I doubt you'll have attack ads where a Super Pac tries to convince voters that your responsible for the death of someone who had cancer and lost their healthcare because of a Bain buyout. That is just incredible.

The problem is that Finance doesn't do itself any favors because many times they become indignant and defensive instead of accepting that hey, maybe we fucked up a few times but here is what we are going to do to fix it. Instead, they go right back to the well doing the same tricks over and over again. I can think of a hundred ways to defend what finance did and will do in the future, but appearances will override most things. At least LOOK like you give a shit and are trying to restrain yourself. Finance will get way too much credit and too much blame because it is far easier to scapegoat those who benefited the most from dimwit policies that allowed excess financialization of the economy and wanton greed by everyone and their cousin. People don't want to accept that they screwed up and took on more than they could afford in multiple lifetimes, and now when it comes time to pay for it all who do they turn against? The enablers. It makes sense, but then again a 75% tax on high earners doensn't make much sense either.

 
Thomas Ausart:
Being in finance and making the move to politics will probably give your opponent a good argument to tear you down...

In France with all the bad press finance people get it'd be impossible to fight back.

Yeah, except that in France, once you're in politics you're off limits. Lapdog press doesn't even begin to describe French political reportage, where "Monsieur President, do you prefer a light vinaigrette on your salad?" is considered a hardball question.

 

"All my life I kept trying to go up in society. Where everything higher up was legal. But the higher I go, the crookeder it becomes. Where the hell does it end?" (Michael Corleone, Godfather III)

In Asian countries, especially countries like China, you can't separate business interests with political interests. The only way you can secure your business (if you run a major enterprise in sensitive sectors like TMT or Natural Resources), you need as much help you can get from the government.

I was offered a Congressional Aide position to the speaker of the House in my country. I declined that offer. Maybe in a few years down the road, I will be running for a seat in the parliament.

"I am the hero of the story. I don't need to be saved."
 

If I was to have a successful career in finance, definitely. But to a certain extent I think it may be better to serve in a state position (governor perhaps), as opposed to federal. Just dont feel like I personally would have the credentials (not having served in the military) that Id feel would be qualified to potentially command troops to go to war. And then, governors like Christie can have very aggressive styles of governing while being conservative in more liberal leaning areas, so there are some very interesting opportunities.

“...all truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” - Schopenhauer
 
GoldmanBallSachs:
I'd like to think that the average WSO user has too much self-respect to go into politics... but I'm sure I'm wrong

This may come as a shock, but running for office isn't about making money, or getting the ego stroked - it's about serving your country. Lots of comments out there complaining about politicians not knowing anything about finance, but plenty of comments like this discouraging them from running. There's a few members of congress, on both sides, with finance backgrounds (some investment bankers). Might be good to have more people like that writing the law.

Keep Humming Along
 

Not a chance. There is no autonomy left in politics. In finance, your goals are quantifiable, and you can be hugely successful based solely off your own abilities. Of course networking makes things easier, but at least the possibility of hitting that huge highly levered trade with your own capital exists in finance; in politics, being successful essentially entails juggling the highest number of high-powered scrotums possible, massaging each the perfect amount so as to not become too associated with any one scrotum. I could never dupe myself into joining politics under the auspice of promoting cultural change, policy change, etc either--especially as a second career--because it's my personal belief that meaningful change requires far more than 2 or 4 or 6 year terms of this or that policy to enact, and the cost/benefit of all the scrotum juggling wouldn't be worth it. I'm not sure how you could look at our inept Congress and possibly want to participate in all that frivolity and sycophantic behavior.
You want to really make a difference? Get a job with the CBOE or Fed

I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.
 

The thought of having to listen to hordes or proletariat's makes me shudder. Having to beg for the votes of people who can barely read at a 7th grade level is not my idea of a self actualized life.

 

Look at what they're doing to Romney. Who would subject himself to that? I would like to serve my country, but having to go through a campaign is a strong deterrent.

Oh, I bought stock in Phillip Morris? Clearly, I support cancer. That's the sort of mudslinging you can expect.

And once I got to DC, then what? Only the most ideological people take it upon themselves to run for national office - you're not going to change anybody's mind once your there.

And all this comes at the cost of making your family's life hell. They get the media scrutiny, but none of the benefits of being an elected official.

 

The person with the money has more power than the person who has to beg for it. Why become a politician when you can influence policy with your money?

All I care about in life is accumulating bananas
 

In India, becoming a politician is the best thing actually. Accountability and responsibilities are zero because nearly all the ground work is handled by civil servants, if some disaster happens, it's the civil servants who answer.

I guess, India is probably the only country where as a politician you can rake up hundreds of millions of dollors and still Income Tax Department won't knock on your door unless you make enemies in the central government. Other benifits include complete evasion from law in minor crimes like hit and run, homicide, rape etc etc. The maximum downside is house arrest, if you happen to become a media darling who stole away billions of dollors or public money in a single stint, otherwise you'll be okey.

 

I've always thought it would be cool to be like the characters from Enders Game. They had political ends to their schemes. So maybe.

“...all truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” - Schopenhauer
 

Money is real power. And the thought of the unwashed masses casting judgement on anything I might have done is sickening. People who otherwise couldn't comprehend putting different shaped wood blocks into different holes having an opinion on how someone lives their life is one of the most distasteful elements of modern politics.

 
TNA:
Money is real power. And the thought of the unwashed masses casting judgement on anything I might have done is sickening. People who otherwise couldn't comprehend putting different shaped wood blocks into different holes having an opinion on how someone lives their life is one of the most distasteful elements of modern politics.

This would be the worst part for me also. You try your best to do the right thing and you have a bunch of people who instantly judge/hate you because of one misinterpreted talking point or snap judgement on something they have no understanding of. Not worth the shitty pay (at the lower levels) and stress of having people hate you for no reason other than trying to help them.

This to all my hatin' folks seeing me getting guac right now..
 
TNA:
Money is real power. And the thought of the unwashed masses casting judgement on anything I might have done is sickening. People who otherwise couldn't comprehend putting different shaped wood blocks into different holes having an opinion on how someone lives their life is one of the most distasteful elements of modern politics.

The "unwashed masses"? And you wonder why Americans hate Wall Street? Have a little compassion and empathy for the average American. Better yet, try visiting a place like Traverse City, MI or Fort Wayne, IN and talking to the people before labeling them an unwashed mass.

 

Might go into politics on a local level when I get more free time. I want to shape and have a say in the area I live in, but that is about it. No Congress or Senate for me.

CNBC sucks "This financial crisis is worse than a divorce. I've lost all my money, but the wife is still here." - Client after getting blown up
 

For years and years I was actively involved in the Republican Party. In high school I won a senior superlative--"Most likely to end up on Capitol Hill". Part of me still has the itch for politics, but a year or so ago is when I realized that politics probably isn't for me. I'm friends with a young state legislator (about 31 years old I think) and he posted on Facebook something to the effect of, "Just got my new committee assignments. Interstate Cooperation, Agriculture & Natural Resources, and Aging and Long-term Care. So excited!"

It was then, after all those years of dreaming, that it finally sunk in that the "glamorous" part of the job--TV interviews, debate and votes on major issues, rousing political speeches, etc.--is about 1% of the job. The other 99% of the job is sitting on committees and debating/discussing the most mind numbingly boring topics ever concocted by mankind. I realized that my job owning and managing bank branches is about 1 million times more interesting than politics and that I would never be able to enjoy the meat of the job that is elective service.

That said, local politics--member of the county Board of Supervisors, for example--is something that still interests me as I could actually impact the quality of life of my community.

 
DCDepository:
It was then, after all those years of dreaming, that it finally sunk in that the "glamorous" part of the job--TV interviews, debate and votes on major issues, rousing political speeches, etc.--is about 1% of the job. The other 99% of the job is sitting on committees and debating/discussing the most mind numbingly boring topics ever concocted by mankind. I realized that my job owning and managing bank branches is about 1 million times more interesting than politics and that I would never be able to enjoy the meat of the job that is elective service.

Suppose the same could be said about most positions. The glory and major decision making is at the top in any industry. That said, I'm young and naive and would like to go into politics some day so I could make the world a better place.

 

I figure if I'm between 35-40, still have my hair, and haven't done anything shady, I'll start looking at local and state positions. The highest I could see myself is Governor, or maybe the Cabinet. If I turn into a complete a-hole I might try Congress. As long as no one knows my idea to raise the SS age to 75 I think I can make it pretty far. Otherwise I'll get raped by some welfare white knight in the primaries.

"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." --Abraham Lincoln
 
Carlos Danger:

Rahm Emanuel and Jim Himes come to mind. Himes got his start at Goldman before switching to non-profit. Apparently you have to be a Democrat.

This.

"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." --Abraham Lincoln
 

With the way Wall St has been vilified recently it may hurt your chances but if you're only doing it for a few years it may have less of an impact and who knows, in 10-20 years when you're more likely to run finance may not be the whipping boy and people may hate google. The law degree would be the correct route though. For better or worse everyone in the Beltway seems to be a lawyer.

 

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