4 ms·
> Congressional salaries should be exactly the median US salary. Congressional salaries should be $1m+. It would only half a billion dollars a year. A pittance
by koolba 1y ago
> Congressional salaries should be exactly the median US salary.
Congressional salaries should be $1m+. It would only half a billion dollars a year. A pittance of the $6.75 trillion federal budget.
Combine that high salary with mandatory life sentences for accepting any form of graft and you have a recipe for honest people to enter government. Pretty much the Singapore model for compensation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_Singapore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_Singapore
The problem with low or median salaries for politicians is the ratio of power to compensation. It directly encourages the griftiest of grifters to accept the low salary and abuse their positions of power.
With a high enough salary, you will attract honest people who will do the job functions knowing that any deviation from working on behalf of the people will not only make you broke, it will land you in prison for life.
- t-3 1y agoHow do you convince Congress to pass a law subjecting themselves to the death penalty? What do you do about the legal bribery? Do you really think that you can raise congressional salaries high enough that "speaking fees" or "campaign contributions" won't make them a drop in the bucket? Why is salary imagined to be an important factor when the majority of elected officials are not in any way wanting for money? The basic structure of representative democracies ensure that representatives are largely drawn from the class of the idle rich and upper-class who can afford to stop working at a relatively young age.
- Mountain_Skies 1y agoA constitutional amendment, brought about through a constitutional convention of the states, is probably the only way. Even then, the state legislators might be concerned that they too will be held to similar standards.
- koolba 1y ago> The basic structure of representative democracies ensure that representatives are largely drawn from the class of the idle rich and upper-class who can afford to stop working at a relatively young age. That's what this purports to solve. By having the direct compensation for being an elected member of Congress be high enough that it would provide a well compensated life for someone who is not rich before becoming a politician.
- t-3 1y agoHow can a non-rich person afford to campaign and do all the necessary politicking to get elected? Getting money after being elected has never been the problem - even those congresspeople who somehow get elected from humbler origins seem to become multimillionaires pretty quickly after gaining office. The reason the vast majority are drawn from the upper crust is the time and money costs involved in the initial campaigning.