Actually, more than halve it. Cut 60% right out of his salary. Why should our elected officials get a salary that allows them to live better than the people they serve? According to Wikipedia, the per capita income in Maine is just under $28,000. Why not peg the governor’s and legislators’ salaries to the per capita income for the state? That way, they don’t get raises unless the people of the state get raises.
Seem fair? Has any other state tried anything like it? I doubt it would ever pass the legislature, but we do have Ballot Initiatives in Maine.
If you’re responsible for an organization with an operating budget of 6 billion dollars I’d hazard a guess that you should probably be compensated a bit better than the average.
You get what you pay for. Cut the salary and you’ll cut the number of people who are willing to become governor. In real world situations where politics was an unpaid profession, it was run by people with inherited wealth who generally didn’t give a damn about the wages of the working class.
It’s an interesting proposal. I’d disagree with using per capita income since children would be included in that number. Average income in Maine is just under $50k according to Google that seems a better thing to peg to if you’re going to.
Of course while the upside is while you’re encouraging the governor to raise income for the entire state the downside is you’re only going to get average people or the independently wealthy to want to be your governor. A successful engineer, businessman or doctor isn’t going to want to take the pay cut to be governor so you’d lose the best and brightest. Personally I’d rather pay my governor at the salary level of the CEO of a large non ptofit. The CEO of Maine health the second largest non profit in Maine earned $790k per year from what I can tell in total compensation. Now there is obviously a incentive problem with pegging salary that way but you’d be able to recruit people who have successfully run other large organizations meant to help people which is the person I’d prefer.
Exactly right. If you want to set the wages at $1 a year, that’s fine, but that means anyone taking the job has to be rich already. Either that or willing to make their money on the side by selling favors.
Seriously, does anyone run for Governor because they’re looking for those fat stacks of cash that a governor pulls down in salary? Even if you only want to run for office to cash in, everyone knows that the cash comes after you retire when you go to work for the lobbyists.
Considering that the Governor of Maine is thelowest paid Governor of all 50 states, a raise doesn’t seem out of place. But setting it to the per capita income in the state for legislators would give them a raise.
Compare that to the salaries of state legislators and the Governor of Maine earns less than a state legislator in Michigan. And those legislators in New Hampshire - $200 for a two year term.
Agreed. For the reasons already mentioned. You want highly qualified people, you have to increase the pay to where it may be worth it for them to take the job (otherwise, as already said, you’d mostly have highly qualified people who were already independently wealthy, who wouldn’t care about salary).
Tying to average wages seems less appropriate than tying to approval rating. For example, Governor’s salary is abased off of a comparable wage for that type of job in that area and a satisfactory performance is some function of the approval rating and disapproval rating. If he has an average performance, his salary stays the same or gets COLA and he gets a raise if he does exceptionally well and a pay cut if he sucks.
The point is, if you tie it just to the average wage, what happens if the economy tanks for reasons not his fault but he does a great job handling it. Or what if the people are less concerned with their income than other issues facing the state and he addresses those instead. On the other end, what if he figures out a way to game the system to push up the average wage by, say, killing a lot of low paying jobs and giving big tax breaks to large corporations to move more high paying jobs from nearby states just across the border so it boosts that average wage but doesn’t really help the state’s economy.
Either way, tying to the average worker doesn’t make much sense. Like what others said, to attract the best and brightest, you need to be willing to pay for it. Yes, CEOs of large corporations are generally overpaid in my opinion, not unlike athletes and actors and all, but at the same time, it’s gotten that high because if they ARE that good, if one person won’t pay them, someone else will.
Well, what standard of living should a governor expect? $70,000 per year is already a king’s salary for many of us living here. That’s a salary where one spouse could comfortably quit working and stay home with the kids, and the family would still be living a very comfortable, middle class lifestyle. Why should the governor’s individual salary be more than the median household salary of the people he serves? I don’t think he has to pay rent on the Blaine house, so what exactly are his living expenses, and why would they be so much more than the rest of us?
My primary thought here is that he should have some incentive to improve the lives of the people he serves—He and all the other politicians. None of them should see even one red cent of an increase without there first being a commensurate increase for the people for whom they work.
Tying to approval rating just means the governor will be incentivized to promote short-term popular programs with no care to the long term consequences, or promote programs that help a huge number of people at the great expense of a few. Things like doubling the salaries of state employees through deficit spending would be very popular, but would screw the state budget long-term. Or publicly torturing death row inmates to death on public broadcast television would probably boost approval ratings (i mean, not with me, but I think overall there’s a lot of bloodthirsty types among my countrymen) despite being rather inhumane.
But hey, bread and circuses worked for the Romans for a while. Maybe we should ask the current emperor how it’s going.
The amount an average family makes rather irrelevant to the amount the leader of the state should make. Paying the CEO of McDonald’s based on the wages of the guy flipping the burger is nonsensical. In fact, Ben and Jerry’s tried that for a while, but had to stop when they could no longer find a qualified CEO willing to work for 7 times minimum wage instead of 70.
Presumably the way to do this would be with a bonus structure, not a change to base pay.
This is an entirely laudable sentiment. The way to implement it is to elect honest, dedicated, and hard-working people to office. Not by lowering pay; as stated more cogently above, that only results in poor skill sets or the wealthy elite in office. And not through bonuses either (sorry yellowjacketcoder)–that gives the officeholder incentive to pursue short-term stimulus for personal gain at the cost of long-term benefit to the state. Or merely cook the books.
I don’t know about Governors, but isn’t POTUS required to pay much of his entertainment expenses himself? Including entertainment of diplomats, etc.; comparable expenses by a private-sector executive could be charged to his company. What am I missing?
You first have to convince the honest and hard-working to run for office. Which is usually easier if they can be honest, hard-working, and be compensated well.
Certainly a bonus structure would need a lot of noodling through the details, but if it works for corporate america, it could work for the governor’s mansion too. Of course, in a lot of corporate america, it’s fellow CEOs on the board voting for “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” bonuses, which are not helpful to the company.
It would be somewhat interesting. A 10% bonus for reducing violent crime by 25%? 15% bonus for improving graduation rates by 10%? 20% bonus for increasing the median household income by 10%? Those are things governors should be trying to do anyway but it would be interesting to show exactly what we want them to do and then pay them for it above and beyond just running the ship of state. Of course, we would have to put in a clause that says they can’t reduce violent crime by making murder legal (therefore reducing the crimes reported), lowering graduation requirements (thereby graduating student that would have failed before), or some other “system gaming”.
The argument over what constitutes the measurables of a successful governor is the very argument that takes place every four years when the electorate decides who should be governor.
If one insists on a bonus structure, affixing it to any specific measurable will almost certainly result in a perverse inventive (or a hundred of them.) What constitutes the governor’s priorities change from election to election and will be based on political posturing and personal opinion. I, personally, would find it baffling for a Maine governor to be judged on reducing crime; Maine doesn’t have a lot of crime now, and reducing it further would be a challenge that might not be worth the money and effort.
IMHO, if you’re a good politician your bonus is you get to keep your job after the next election.
And if you’re term-limited? I don’t know if Maine term-limits their governors, but many states do. What’s the incentive to go above-and-beyond if “the bonus” isn’t available.
If we have an intern and tell him “hey Steve, if you can improve widget production by 10% with your changes, we’ll hire you full time!”, Steve is going to work very hard to improve widget production by 10%. If after being hired, we tell Steve “If you can lower production costs by 15%, you’ll get a promotion!”, Steve is going to try very hard to lower those production costs. If we tell Steve “We’re firing you in three months, but can you improve widget tolerances so half as many are rejected then as now”, I really doubt Steve is going to do much about widget tolerances.
Okay, I’m just brainstorming here. Maybe we could establish some sort of system where the people in the state periodically get a chance to review the performance of the politicians and decide whether or not they get to keep their jobs. This would provide an incentive for those politicians to provide good service on an ongoing basis.