Posted on 12/27/2005 6:10:46 AM PST by hubbubhubbub
I don't make a million dollars a year but I think every member of Congress should be paid at least that much. It's not because those turkeys in Washington deserve it. It's because we deserve a lot better people than we have in Congress.
The cost of paying every member of Congress a million dollars a year is absolutely trivial compared to the vast amounts of the taxpayers' money wasted by cheap politicians doing things to get themselves re-elected. You could pay every member of Congress a million dollars a year for a century for less money than it costs to run the Department of Agriculture for one year.
There is no point complaining about the ineptness, deception or corruption of government while refusing to do anything to change the incentives and constraints which lead to ineptness, deception and corruption.
You are not going to get the most highly skilled or intelligent people in the country, people with real-world experience, while offering them one-tenth or less of what such people can earn in the private sector.
A professor of economics at a leading university earns more than a member of Congress or a justice of the Supreme Court -- and a surgeon earns at least twice as much as an economics professor, though still only about a tenth of what a successful corporate executive can make.
How many people in the top layer of their respective professions are going to sacrifice the future of their families -- the ability to give their children the best education, the ability to have something to fall back on in case of illness or tragedy, the ability to retire in comfort and with peace of mind -- in order to go into politics?
A few people here and there may be willing to make such sacrifices for the good of the country but, by and large, you get what you pay for. What we are getting as cheap politicians are often a disgrace -- and enormously costly as reckless spenders of the taxpayers' money in order to keep themselves getting re-elected.
Whatever the problems faced by the country, the number one priority of elected officials is to get re-elected. Nothing does that better than handing out money from the public treasury. Cheap politicians are expensive politicians, currently costing the taxpayers more than a trillion dollars a year.
If you have trouble visualizing what a trillion is, just remember that a trillion seconds ago, no one on this planet could read or write. A trillion seconds is thousands of years. That's the kind of money our cheap politicians are spending in order to keep getting re-elected.
Since re-election is the key, term limits are effective only in so far as they get rid of re-election. If the limit is three terms, then two of those three terms will be spent trying to get re-elected -- and the third term will be spent trying to get elected to some other office.
What term limits need to do is make it nearly impossible to spend a whole career in politics. One term per office and some period of years outside of politics before running again would be a good principle.
Many people today marvel when looking back at the leaders who created the United States of America. Most of the founders of this country had day jobs for years. They were not career politicians.
George Washington, who took pride in his self-control, lost his temper completely when someone told him that a decision he was going to make could cost him re-election as President. He blew up at the suggestion that he wanted to be President, rather than serving as a duty when he would rather be back home.
Power is such a dangerous thing that ideally it should be wielded by people who don't want to use power, who would rather be doing something else, but who are willing to serve a certain number of years as a one-time duty, preferably at the end of a career doing something else.
What about all the experience we would lose? Most of that is experience in creating appearances, posturing, rhetoric, and spin -- in a word, deception. We need leaders with experience in the real world, not experience in the phony world of politics.
Somehow, this article reminded me of that.
Instead of term limits, couldn't we just insist that members of Congress have no limits, but they cannot serve any terms consecutively?
The idea of paying the Congress a million dollars has a hole in it. They would take the Million and still steal all they could.
I'd be happy paying them 10 million a year as long as they didn't show up for work. Would be much cheaperin the long run.
Jack
Sadly the governments proposal to solve this problem would be to get rid of elections to save themselves and turn each position into life appointments and passing the office on to your children - you know, like most countries do.
1) Pick people for congress the way we pick juries. Sure, we'd have a number of dunces in the bunch. But without motivation for corruption, I trust the general honesty and character of the average American more than members of Congress.
2) Copy the legislature of New Hampshire, which has a huge number of members, and increase the number of Congress members by an order of magnitude, or more. The reason is that members would be elected from very small areas, where it's almost guaranteed you will personally know your Congressman. It would be much harder for interest groups to use influence, because they would have to influence so many people. Lobbying would become more like spam, and ignored by members. Any corruption big enough to work, would have so many co-conspirators as to be guaranteed to be exposed.
Sure, we'd have a number of dunces in the bunch.
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Very likely that there would be fewer!
If our misrepresentatives only wanted money, the idea might fly. Few of them go to office with the idea of becoming rich; they enjoy the power and the ego gratification.
no, we need to go back to the days where being a politician was not a full time job and was not a career.
is there a single member of congress that would actually be hurt finacially by not having been in politics? i doubt it.
This discussion didn't get too deep as the next ball game was just starting...
Here are 2 things I thing should be implemented:
#1) they could limit donations to only those who would actually be able to vote for/against the candidates (meaning in state donations)...
#2) a candidate would have had to have lived in that state a minimum of 5 years sometime in their adult life (that would have eliminated Hillary from getting elected in NY)...
The best politicians are also the best paid politicians. Unfortunately they don't work for us and they are called lobbyists.
The puppets that "work" for us are only politicians in the most generic sense.
I suppose that many of the puppets went to Washington with good intentions only to be co-opted. I suspect that only about 30 are still working for their constituents.
IMHO, Sowell is correct, trying to get hired help on the cheap is costing us a trillions.
The idea is not to simply pay more to the same people, but to pay as much as excellence in that position would be worth - then demand excellence. So that high-level professionals would consider public service.To open the way for such people, Professor Sowell proposes term limits to get rid of the lifers. What is wanted is people who don't need the job.
That reminds me of my proposal for changing ballot access rules:
ping
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