I don't mean this as a judgement; I am genuinely curious: with a career like that, how are you out of money after twelve months? Do you have unusual expenses? I am 31, currently making $180k (the most I've ever made) as a bog standard 'senior SWE', and I have nearly a million dollars. I am not frugal, I don't think; I just bought a $900 pair of sunglasses last week, and that wasn't a huge outlier expense. I have at least twenty years of savings right now. What is eating up your (and any onlookers', if you care to comment) budget?
It's also possible that OP means short term savings kept for circumstances like these, and long term investments bear more cost (e.g. keeping money in a money market fund vs in stocks has different tax implications when you take the money out).
The way America was designed may have been pretty novel / innovative at the time but we've learned so much since then about how to build better democracies. Switzerland has a council of seven members as their executive branch, not a single person. It's brilliant stuff. I worry that the only way to do better is through an incredibly painful collapse of things. Unless politicians start deciding to write laws that force them to give up power. Which seems almost humorous to suggest.
> The way America was designed may have been pretty novel / innovative at the time but we've learned so much since then about how to build better democracies.
Well, a lot of dysfunction in government is the result of later evolution, whether evolution of circumstances or of government.
As an example, the combination of senate filibuster (which was around from the earliest days) with the reconciliation workaround (which is pretty recent) results in omnibus bills, which is a well-known driver of partisanship (because you don't talk to the other party at all in order to pass your bill on the floor), and also has significant consequences to individual responsibility (for the same reason, that omnibus bill must pass for your party to do anything, so you can't be faulted for voting for it, and instead you look for carve outs for your interests. If you do decide to hold up the whole bill like the freedom caucus tried, then you get everyone against you and you will eventually fold).
This also has repercussions that for things that can't go through reconciliations, just because the usual way of doing things involves more party dependence (than it would to pass bills another way). This of course also gives more power to those running the party within the chambers of congress.
My point is that things evolve, and people tend to try to explain the current state of things with reference to the 18th century, and while I definitely believe we should evolve systems to be better, we shouldn't ignore evolution that's already occurred.