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Average? Hell no. At least have the kindness to stipulate median. And really, it should be the minimum.
They should also have to use the VA for health insurance
Give them the median wage.
Mode wage. Added up for both the capital they serve (DC or state) and the location they serve (state for senator, district for representative)
Add more term limits. You serve two terms and you’re out, no exceptions. I’ll even lend you a Mexican saying: “Sufragio efectivo no reelección”
Michigan has term limits. It has not worked out well. It makes lobbying way easier, since the lawmakers aren’t very effective earlier in their career. You also wind up with two casts of politians: those who want to be public servants and are forced to run for a different office to keep good on the table and those who are already well heeled. We don’t need the second category in politics.
I looked up Michigan’s term limits which is 12 years, which is honestly very long, so it led me to searching about corruption correlations and here’s what I found:
- The penultimate effect of term limits increases corruption frequency by about 28 %.
- The magnitude effect, stemming from shorter tenures, reduces the average cost of corruption.
- Stricter term limits are associated with lower overall corruption.
- Term limits thus serve as an institutional safeguard against political corruption.
It is well established that lame-duck incumbents tend to be less accountable (Besley and Case, 1995, 2003), hence more prone to corruption, and Tsur (2022) showed that penultimate terms reinforce this effect. […] Corrupt activities typically require close and trusted relationships between the public officials involved in the malfeasance and the private actors offering bribes. This intimacy and trust do not develop overnight, but require time to cultivate. […] Consequently, such corrupt networks are often built gradually through repeated interactions, shared secrets, and a history of successful illicit transactions.
You’d end up with politicians just jumping around tho.
uh, get rid of congress all together and replace them with a liquid democracy structure. There’s not a good reason not to in this day in age. Elected reps just breed corruption.
What is the nature of your existence?
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Bro did you just call me a bugger ater? GTFO my Kongregate! This my flash gaming paradise from the before-times well after Christ.
Might be unpopular be politicians should actually be paid a lot. You want to attract actually skilled and capable people after all
But it should also be there only source of income, no speaking gigs, no stock trades, no side business
It’s also actually a means to prevent corruption unfortunately. Less likely to take ridiculous sums if you’re financially solid
I’d agree with you except we see politicians selling out for even tiny amounts while having tens of millions in the bank. If you’re willing to sell the food out of the mouths of the poor for $2,500 and you’ve got 12 mil in the bank your inherently corrupt and having a big paycheck won’t change that. They have billionaire brain rot, number go up syndrome, as long as number goes up that’s all that matters no matter how much they are given or have.
These people are massively advantaged with the current campaign system/rules.
Live in Missouri. Our state legislature liked to for years vote down a pay raise for themselves. They made sure to stand up and wave “Look at how good we’re doing.”
If I wanted to run for legislature, I would have had to taken a cut in pay and I am definitely not on the top 50% of the state, much less the country.
One of the reasons a lot of government positions track if you have debts is that propensity to financial burdens make politicians more suceptible to corruption.
If you pay them less, they are actually going to be more easily bribed.
If you pay them less, they are actually going to be more easily bribed.
If you keep the same people in office, then yeah. I wonder who else would be up for the job if the pay was lower. Hopefully more Mamdanis.
Nah, it’ll be independently wealthy trust fund kids that don’t need to rely on a paycheck to pay rent, but have a trust that is valued based on policy.
Politicians should be some of the highest paid people in the country. I wouldn’t get out of bed for 70k today, that was my paycheck for my first professional job. Now perhaps you don’t want me as a politician, but…
Where can I find said “average job” that pays this much? I’ve never passed a $40K salary in my life.
My absurd political theory is that there should basically be a big resort hotel. for all of these elected representatives. And it’s pretty nice. Like it’s not 5 star, but it’s pretty nice. No one could complain about being forced to live there. but it is a very strictly regimented life. You only eat what the kitchen makes. You only live in the suites there and you’re not allowed to live anywhere else. In some sense, it’s like a very nice prison, or perhaps a sanatorium. And anyone who goes into these kind of high ranking government positions has to live there, not only for their entire term, but also for the rest of their life.
Sure, you would still get people who were only running for the comfort of living in the resort, but the kind of people who are truly maniacal assholes who want to get rich as fuck and live a life of extreme luxury, off of politics, will be forced to look elsewhere to get their money. If we make the resort mid enough, then only the people who are really aiming for the good of the many will even bother going for these positions.
I like absurdity so tell me in more detail what the benefits of this system would be for the public and the then incentives for the politicians to do this job (this particularly seems to be ppls issue in this thread, though i think most ppl would do it for the want of some type of change to the current system or way things are done, i.e. Leslie Knope style)
401K’s were never meant for retirement. They were initially meant to provide tax perks for executive level employees for their profit sharing bonuses.
They were never meant to replace pensions or be used as a retirement vehicle.
Financial advisors and banks pushed them on regular employees because they fell out of favor with executives in favor or better options.
401Ks are not a good option for regular people. General investment in ETFs or a diversified dividend portfolio and t bonds is much better.
This would mean that the job would only appeal to two kinds of people: those earning below the average wage, or the very rich who don’t care what the job pays.
I’m all for low-earning folks getting a raise by running for Congress, but the problem is that anyone above average wage will see this as a pay cut. And the higher end of wage earners are the more highly educated, skilled, and experienced people.
Even if Congressional wages seem high now, most well qualified professionals can still earn way more in the private sector.
So deadass that’s what I’m actually doing right now lol. Running for office cause it’d get me more money and time off, and well, I care about it anyways. Not congress tho, local type shit
Sadly this is a very solid point. This would probably lead even stronger to the tendency that billionaires could simply bjy representatives/senators.
I like the ideas that people are saying about median and mean wage being the benchmark for congressional pay, but wouldn’t it be nicer if they had to meet metrics in order to get paid?
Since they are supposed to serve the American people, making congressional seats commission-based would be nice. That way they’d actually have to put in effort to make their wages.
And any form of bribery or donations should be considered treason, and the people that commit treason should be treated like traitors (Congress people and their donors).
And on stock trading, having to report the trade a day in advance to some kind of congressional ledger would be nice. On the day of the trade, they have to mention wether or not they executed the trade, and that information should be made public. Or better yet, make their brokerage accounts on a platform designed just for Congress people, and they can’t make trades outside of that platform. All of the trades they make should be public.
One can dream
Won’t even slow them down, they’re generationally wealthy and make more from bribes then most of us well earn in a decade.
mitch, mtg, boebart, vastly increased thier fortune to 10s of millions in the last 5-10years. all that stock trading and other bribes that dont get reported in msms.
I have always heard people make this argument, and since it’s Great British Bake-off time, I’ll use it as the example.
There’s no prize, and the pay per episode is fairly minimal. Less than $500/episode for contestants. Plus, they get ~$2000 stipend for ingredients. On the fly converting pounds to dollars, so these are guesstimates.
What that means is that Great British Bake-off does not find the best home baker in Britain, it finds the best baker who can afford to take time off to be on the show. If you can afford to miss school, work, or being a parent for 12 weeks, you can’t compete.
Same applies here.
If you can’t afford to live on the salary, you’ll only get people in office who don’t need the salary. We already get that to some extent with campaigning costs. This could make it worse. The barrier of entry is higher.
Instead, we need a performance review with real consequences other than “Guess I don’t get re-elected, but I still get a book deal.”
I have always thought it should be twice the average median income of the state they represent.
But you bring up much larger issues. There are so many bars to running for office that make it so much easier for capital holders. I say people who hold capital should be barred from public office. I will leave the exact definition of “holding capital” up to the reader.
They should also have to work the minimum amount per week to get benefits.
Would be fine with them earning a multiple of minimum wage so when they raise their salary they raise the minimum.
Alternatively: tie the minimum wage to inflation. Some US states do this.
