Congressional Compensation

Apparently a new poll shows that all of no one thinks Congressmen should be paid over $150,000 per year. Boy do I get why people think that. But I also think I pretty strongly disagree. There's a few reasons why: a) Members of Congress are public servants, representing the people in our representative government. Those are the kind of person we should value and treat well. b) People respond to incentives, or so me econ textbooks tell me. If I could go be a Congressman but I could also go into the private sector and make a hell of a lot more money, at the margins I'll be less inclined to try to run for Congess. c) I suppose you could say that you don't want those motivated by monetary greed in Congress, only those who want to do it out of civic duty. Problem is, it's a lot easier to live on $150,000 per year in Washington, D.C. (and I imagine costs of living actually aren't low for a Congressman) if you have several million dollars in your bank account to start with, so this will be yet another way to encourage rich people to run our political power structure in addition to our economic power structure. d) If somebody wants to be a public servant for the purpose of cashing out, they can do it anyway by serving in Congress for a while and then becoming a high-powered lobbyist. It happens all the time. In any event, there's still always the power-hungry motivation, so it's not clear you gain very much in terms of shrinking selfish motives for becoming a Congressman by lowering nominal Congressional salary.

Finally, of course, notice that a $200,000 salary per Congressman is only $87,000,000 per year, which is quite honestly not very much in terms of the federal budget. So this isn't really about fiscal responsibility; it's a rounding error on the federal budget. It's about two things, how well we want to reward our democratic representatives and what kind of incentive structure we want to set up for people to try to become representatives. And on both those counts I think you don't gain anything by pinching pennies with our Congressmen.