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Thomas Sowell: Cheap Politicians
Creator's Syndicate ^ | December 27, 2005 | Dr. Thomas Sowell

Posted on 12/26/2005 10:31:03 PM PST by RWR8189

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.

Copyright 2005 Creators Syndicate


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Editorial; Government; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: congresscritters; congressionalpay; pay; politicians; sowell; thomassowell
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1 posted on 12/26/2005 10:31:05 PM PST by RWR8189
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To: RWR8189

Hear, hear.


2 posted on 12/26/2005 10:35:21 PM PST by sinanju
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To: RWR8189

You can make the case that you can hire competence. But can you hire honesty?

It really depends on the people doing the hiring.


3 posted on 12/26/2005 10:38:42 PM PST by Dan Evans
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To: RWR8189
"Never Re-Elect Anyone!"

--- campaign slogan for Texas gubernatorial candidate "Kinky" Friedman

4 posted on 12/26/2005 10:40:54 PM PST by Alberta's Child (Said the night wind to the little lamb . . . "Do you see what I see?")
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To: RWR8189
Fine - but ONLY with term limits.
5 posted on 12/26/2005 10:42:40 PM PST by decal (Mother Nature and Real Life are conservatives; the Progs have never figured this out.)
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To: RWR8189

6 posted on 12/26/2005 10:45:02 PM PST by george76 (Ward Churchill : Fake Indian, Fake Scholarship, and Fake Art)
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To: RWR8189
Thomas Sowell, an American Treasure.

Thank you for posting.

TT
7 posted on 12/26/2005 10:46:20 PM PST by TexasTransplant (NEMO ME IMPUNE LACESSET)
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To: Dan Evans

With all due respect to Thomas Sewell, whom I like a lot, I truly do not believe that paying politicians more would get us better ones.

What drives these guys is not money, but power. Most of them are already wealthy before they get elected.

What I would be in favor of would be to have them work less - a lot less...


8 posted on 12/26/2005 10:47:13 PM PST by aquila48
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To: aquila48

>>>"What I would be in favor of would be to have them work less - a lot less..."<<<

Or work very hard to make what they do = less and less

TT quote "For every new Law, 7 should have to be repealed, in 20 or 30 years we may notice a difference"

TT


9 posted on 12/26/2005 10:52:54 PM PST by TexasTransplant (NEMO ME IMPUNE LACESSET)
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To: Dan Evans

How many States are Proposition States, maybe this is something to consider?


10 posted on 12/26/2005 10:55:20 PM PST by ShuShu
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To: RWR8189

First he assumes we want worker bees instead of drones. Then he assumes they'll remain worker bees.
Do we want productive people in politics, producing what politics produces? Would high salaries be sufficient to attract them? How long before we found ourselves with the same sort of people we had before, only more expensive?


11 posted on 12/26/2005 10:55:25 PM PST by Graymatter
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To: RWR8189
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.

I completely disagree with Sowell here. Without sufficient time to learn the basics, you have idiots voting on military, or medical or telecommunications bills about which they know NOTHING.

Like it or not, it takes at least one term to get through the minutiae of procedure.

After that, if you find yourself on a committee, you can learn about the subject at hand.

After that, you MIGHT, and I repeat, MIGHT, be qualified for a chairmanship.

I firmly believe a 3-term position is the minimum for having qualified people in our legislative branch. Our world is too complex these days for people who don't understand stem cells, cell phone towers and military prison cells! This is NOT the Congress of the 1800s!

I don't want to have to start over at kindergarten with every freakin' member of Congress!

We already HAVE term limits. It's called a "vote."

12 posted on 12/26/2005 10:57:50 PM PST by paulat
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To: RWR8189

The main premise behind the article is correct, but WHOLLY misdirected!

Instead of attracting the malfeasant and mercenary with money, how about the "salaries" of the elected are ZERO! NIL, NADA, ZILCH, NOTHING!

The elected are only allowed a small ($500K/year) budget for office and franking expenses.

Any monies they earn SPEAKING as an elected representative are returned to the treasury as part of their service.

Term limits won't be needed for those who are effective, and the ineffective will be dust in the wind.



13 posted on 12/26/2005 11:09:48 PM PST by Don W (Stress is when you wake up screaming, and then you realize you haven't fallen asleep yet.)
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To: Don W
The elected are only allowed a small ($500K/year) budget for office and franking expenses.

And just how are they supposed to maintain residences in their home districts and DC? How are they supposed to support their families?

The only members of the legislative branch you will have will be Ted Kennedy and John Kerry....

You have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what it takes to be a member of Congress.

14 posted on 12/26/2005 11:15:08 PM PST by paulat
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To: TexasTransplant
The 21st amendment provides a nice model for Congress. The [insert reams of statute titles] are hereby repealed. The President can do the same for Executive orders by himself. If Congress is too [insert your own pejoratives] to do this there could be a commission empowered to generate the reams of candidates, but there has to be special rules for how Congress treats their eventual report. Individual statues can only be removed from the list by a 2/3 super majority of either house then the remainder get one package up/down recorded filibuster proof vote in both houses. Done when signed by the President. If they really need to put something back in they can restore it separately by the normal law writing process quickly; the legalese is already worked out.
15 posted on 12/26/2005 11:21:11 PM PST by JohnBovenmyer
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To: sinanju

It won't work. We'll just have higher-paid crooks.

Government needs to back off its sphere of influence. We start this with the Fair Tax....there's no alternative.


16 posted on 12/26/2005 11:26:12 PM PST by Loud Mime (Libs will oppose terrorists when they turn into smoking, christian, whale killers)
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To: RWR8189

You can end up with cheap politicians no matter what you pay them. Some of our worst are wealthy.


17 posted on 12/26/2005 11:29:22 PM PST by Mind-numbed Robot (Not all that needs to be done needs to be done by the government.)
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To: paulat
I completely disagree with Sowell here. Without sufficient time to learn the basics, you have idiots voting on military, or medical or telecommunications bills about which they know NOTHING.

Pray, tell me, what do we have in office now?

18 posted on 12/26/2005 11:38:13 PM PST by taxesareforever (Government is running amuck)
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To: TexasTransplant

We are blessed to have such a clear-thinking resource as we have in the gift of Thomas Sowell.

Let's press him into even more exalted imminence.


19 posted on 12/27/2005 12:03:57 AM PST by CBart95
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To: RWR8189

I'll take a statesman over a politican any day.


20 posted on 12/27/2005 12:05:27 AM PST by AZRepublican
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