"I, personally, think politicians get paid way too much money. Quote from a very naive 29 year old incoming MP, and of course he’s a Green.
I think he’s totally wrong and elected officials should be well paid, running the government of a major country like Australia should be a full time professional job. But of course, Greens prefer to live in a world of rainbows and unicorns.
Disagree. I think they should be paid less than they are, as a way to discourage lifetime professional pols. The entire concept of democracy is beginning to annoy, as presently practiced. I just heard a podcast by Malcolm Gladwell arguing for choosing leaders by a lottery (of the interested, not of the entire population) and this fits into that idea quite well.
If you don’t pay politicians a decent salary, only rich people will be able to afford to be in public service. I’d rather make it possible for individuals from all economic backgrounds to be able to serve.
While it applies a bit more to technocrats/policy makers than actual elected politicians, I’ve never understood the argument that outsiders are intrinsically better qualified leaders than people who know the ropes. Would you like the next airplane you take to be flown by a total novice rather than an experienced pilot? How about when you need brain surgery, would you like some random person to be pulled off the street to perform it?
If not, I don’t know why you’d want your country to be run by someone with no political experience.
I disagree with this premise. A lot of people would love to earn half a congressman’s salary, and they could do the job for a term or two, and then go back to doing what they were doing before. Of course they can’t afford to campaign for the job, but if they could (public financing?) they could serve in office just fine. When you look at all the idiots, kooks, cranks, nuts, jerks and assholes serving in Congress today, it’s hard to argue that it’s a rigorous screening process that they have, or that a lottery system of willing candidates could do much worse.
Then I gather that you are okay with paying politicians a reasonable wage - enough, say, to afford a move to DC and home when the term or two is up, plus a kid or two in college?
Or you could have what the NYS Assembly* used to be - a bunch of people earning approximately half of what a Congressional representative currently earns to be part-time legislators. Which in theory was to enable people to be citizen-legislators, running a business or possibly working at an ordinary job while serving as an elected official but in practice amounted to legislators having lucrative law practices “on the side” and that outside income almost certainly increased the chances of corruption. ( After all, if Sheldon Silver doesn’t work for that law firm , he has no reason to steer government grants to a doctor in exchange for the doctor referring patients to that law firm). Might be better to pay them more and limit or prohibit outside income.
I would never agree to paying a politician by giving him/her a kid, whether in college or not.
Seriously, AOC is my model–by taking a congressperson’s salary she was actually increasing her income considerably, and raising the average IQ of Congress significantly.
This, and the fact that you do not want to create a perverse financial incentive for the people in the most important jobs to dedicate any less than 100% of their effort to their work.
There’s nothing wrong with being a “lifetime professional pol” if you are highly competent. (Term limits for leaders would be an exception.) The correct mechanism to remove incompetent lifetime professional pols it the ballot box. Voters may sometimes vote for idiots, but I don’t think you should try to fix that problem by paying all politicians as though they were idiots.
Tie their salary to the average American income.
Are you suggesting it should be equal to the average? Or that increases should be index-linked? I think the latter makes sense.
I’d kind of like it to be equal to the average. Maybe then they’d enact policy to help the average American.
I think that’s just not compatible with a free market economy. People with superior skills and competence earn more than average. I think you want politicians to be dedicated to their work for idealistic reasons. But I think they should be paid a fair salary for their skills.
I can’t find anything to admire about her.
At Boston University AOC double majored in international relations and economics and graduated cum laude with two bachelor of arts degrees in 2011.
Ok fine, that’s a good start. So what does she do? Becomes a bartender?? If she wants to be a bartender for her entire life, that’s fine. But I ain’t electing a bartender to Congress and I am going to be highly skeptical of anyone with degrees from a good university that was ‘just a bartender’
Is it better to have only millionaires in public office?
Exactly.
So, only millionaires?
…or any of the millions of average Americans who already make that same wage?
If that had been relevant when she was first getting elected, figure it’d no longer be relevant once she’s up for re-election: she’s no longer ‘just a bartender’, she’s now — an elected official, right?
That said, I’m not sure why earning an honest living as ‘just a bartender’ would have been relevant back when; isn’t the key question what she’ll do in Congress, primarily boiling down to how she’ll vote?
I think something like $80,000 (adjusted for purchasing power parity) would be a reasonable salary for any Congressman/woman.
What? So one should only become a bartender if one plans to be a bartender for their entire life?
That’s a ludicrously inane position.
Clearly, she should have instead gotten her income the honest, hard-working American way, by inheriting a few hundred million dollars. If she can’t even have the sense to be born to rich parents, how can we trust her in Congress?
Sounds like the classic Songs from a Distant Earth in which the politicians are selected randomly from the qualified voters for a mandatory term/sentence - think jury duty writ large. Of course, that was a homogenous cultural society on a small scale with no outside influence or conflict prior to the events of the story.