Just make inside trading and taking corporate and foreign Pac bribes illegal for them.
Currently these two rules alone are why they rig laws for corportations and big pharma and insurance and oil companies, weapon manufaturers, banks, israel... they work for everyone but the citizens... And that some fucking how is legal and practiced in the open by both Democrats and Conservatives alike

The usual argument against this is that the less politicians earn, the easier they are to bribe.

Might be unpopular be politicians should actually be paid a lot. You want to attract actually skilled and capable people after all

But it should also be there only source of income, no speaking gigs, no stock trades, no side business

Sounds good on paper, until you notice this means... only the wealthy would ever bother running for office.

They should also have to use the VA for health insurance

Median is a better choice as its less affected by outliers.

The mean average is the amount you compute by putting all the money that is earned in a big pot and dividing it up evenly amongst everyone.

Median is where you find the single most average person and ask them how much they make.

Median gives them an incentive to improve the income of the average American. Mean average gives an incentive to increase national wealth regardless of who's hands its in, and an incentive to decrease the population. That is not a good incentive.

But also keep in mind congress members are local representatives. They need to be in DC while in session, and in their state or district at other times to be available to their constituents. The job requires maintaining two households, so they should earn enough for that. Unless we provide them college dorm level mandatory housing in the capital. Then median alone is enough.

I have always heard people make this argument, and since it's Great British Bake-off time, I'll use it as the example.

There's no prize, and the pay per episode is fairly minimal. Less than $500/episode for contestants. Plus, they get ~$2000 stipend for ingredients. On the fly converting pounds to dollars, so these are guesstimates.

What that means is that Great British Bake-off does not find the best home baker in Britain, it finds the best baker who can afford to take time off to be on the show. If you can afford to miss school, work, or being a parent for 12 weeks, you can't compete.

Same applies here.

If you can't afford to live on the salary, you'll only get people in office who don't need the salary. We already get that to some extent with campaigning costs. This could make it worse. The barrier of entry is higher.

Instead, we need a performance review with real consequences other than "Guess I don't get re-elected, but I still get a book deal."

If members of Congress earn the average or median wage, that will ensure that only the rich can actually hold that position. Very, very few non-rich people would take that risk.

Early retirement, absolutely.

With regards to politicians wages, I think they should be commensurate with the responsibilities of the job. But they should have no other means of income during their term, and potentially for a period afterwards. There would need to be much more stringent auditing and enforcement to ensure this.

Politicians engaging I'm outside employment seems crazy to me, and is clearly a route to corruption.

Better yet, bring back the ancient Greek lottery for state office.

And no money from lobbyists, no insider trading and no ability to award contracts to private entities

My thoughts on that was they got paid the average pay for the state the live in. Down here in the south they would have to get food stamps.

And a wealth cap. If you have 20 million networth but want to give it all up save under 200k (current median networth) to be a public servant then by all means. They made Jimmy Carter give up his peanut farm, which was the right thing, we should do the same for politicians today.

Just checking the room here, y'all know that Congress doesn't control things like private pensions, 401Ks, or average wages, right? You're blaming Congress for the blight of capitalism.

They also don't take that large of a salary. The actual issue is that they are allowed to do insider trading and make an undeserved fortune investing...

But pretending that all of these problems are just problems with how the laws are written is just ignoring the actual source of these problems.

MEDIAN wage. No rich to skew things.

No.

The only reform we need is to take money out of politics.

If you get X number of people to sign your petition, you get y dollars to spend on a campaign. The spending is well monitored, so the candidate can't buy themselves a Lambo and call it a legit expense.

Would be fine with them earning a multiple of minimum wage so when they raise their salary they raise the minimum.

This would mean that the job would only appeal to two kinds of people: those earning below the average wage, or the very rich who don’t care what the job pays.

I’m all for low-earning folks getting a raise by running for Congress, but the problem is that anyone above average wage will see this as a pay cut. And the higher end of wage earners are the more highly educated, skilled, and experienced people.

Even if Congressional wages seem high now, most well qualified professionals can still earn way more in the private sector.

Add more term limits. You serve two terms and you're out, no exceptions. I'll even lend you a Mexican saying: “Sufragio efectivo no reelección”