Big money in politics.Follow

This story on Yahoo caught my eye this morning. It details how much money Sarah Palin, Glen Beck, **** Armey, and Andrew Breitbart are making as conservative speakers. It bothers me that they don't show any comparative speakers on the other side of the aisle.

Regardless, it got me thinking about money and politics. It seems that money is really the driving influence for politians these days. I'm sure there are a lot of people who started in politics through an actual desire to do good and represent their constituents. But I think that as time goes on, that starts to shift further and further back as their want and need to continue their lifestyle pushes itself forward. A quick search tells me that congressmen and senators make about $175,000 a year. The speaker of the house makes $223,000, and the majority and minority leaders of both houses make $195,000. Their benefits are excellent, including foreign travel, domestic travel, per diems, expense reimbursements, and health insurance.

I wonder what would happen if we made government service a voluntary or low pay job with little benefits. Do you think it would help weed out the greedy politians who are only in it for the money and prestige? Is it even feasible to do something like that, considering the amount of work and time away from families that being in a government job entails? I mean, with the death threats from the health care reform bill, maybe it's silly to consider it.

Anyway, it was slow on the forums today, and I got to thinking. I wondered what other people thought.


Edited, Apr 27th 2010 10:55am by Belkira

I'd like to see a comparison as well but I can't think of anyone with a liberal profile to compare who isn't an active senator, House member or the president.

As cushy as those salaries sound, most politicians in Washington were independently wealthy before they ran for office, and the salary they are paid is considered a token sum. (Joe Biden, with net assets under $300K before he became Vice Prez, was considered the poorest Senator.)

Also, the cost of living in Washington is absurd. $175K in Washington is closer in value to $75K in non-major-metro areas of the country; to get a similar cost of living you'd have to live in NYC or the Bay Area.

And yet you suggested it, so as stupid as it sounds let's explore it, shall we? Somewhere in the 1.3-1.5m range is the current active military force. The national government employment number is somewhere on the order of 22.5. So there we're talking about 6.7% of the government without education spending. Add an extra 10m people to the roles and you have just 4.6% of the number. Adding it to the conversation is nothing more than an attempt to obfuscate & redirect. In other words, don't be a dumbass.

As of March, 2010 there were roughly 140m people employed in the US according to BLS (107.3m Private, 22.5m Gov., 10.2m Ed.). 23.4% of them were on the government payroll. I won't even attempt to quantify the number of people employed in the private sector who depend solely on government contracts for a livelihood, but anecdotally the number should be somewhere between 3 & 5m. So you have somewhere in the relatively accurate neighborhood of 35m people in the U.S. with every reason to vote for an out of control government whose only solution to any problem is to reach further in to my pocket for a bigger share of my pie. You can make all the hay you like about one off contracts going to a company more than likely best suited to accomplish the task (ZOMGHaliburton! How many other companies in the U.S. are as well suited to run an operation of the scope and scale that it was asked to take on? The number is small) but in reality the only way to control federal spending is to create less dependents, not more and the current course is never going to accomplish that.

You're hi. Since 2008 we've lost 8.3m private sector jobs and only 92k education jobs. In the same period we've actually gained 117k non-education total government jobs.

Fighting tooth and nail to protect your kidnapping gang rapists is hard work and few companies are up to the task!

I think the middle position is the safest, as far as that goes: some margin, but not a CEO-level salary. Too little makes that lobbyist money all the more tempting. Too much lures in the wrong candidate.

Hello fail to comprehend budgets. Government gets its money from taxes & fees. Government employees like bigger budgets because they get raises and often new government jobs. Government job creation uses money taken from the private sector. Governments set their own budget. Government employees vote for government office-holders who will take my money to create more government workers.

Pointless cynicism is SO COOL.

It's so cool that everyone is doing it these days so I stopped.