What’s a politician worth?

If you’ll stop laughing for a moment, let’s reframe the question. We’ve veered into an unhealthy debate on this subject of value for money.

More precisely: How much should a politician be paid – that is, how much ought to be in keeping with the scope of the job, the size of the community being served, and the scale of comparable roles in the private sector?

Can we ever solve the proverbial chicken-and-egg, what-comes-first dilemma involving capabilities and compensation with politicians and pay packages – specifically, do we offer great salaries to attract good people or do we get good people to then reward great salaries?

Can we really attract great skill to public life and its responsibilities without bestowing significant sums, and how might thrifty compensation repel the best and brightest from serving?

And to add a wrinkle to this, because this appears to be the topic du jour, yet another question: when our elected officials are appointed to additional public agencies, should they be entitled to double-, triple-, even quadruple- and quintuple-dip?

We are in a curious blend of displeasure: inadequate oversight of setting compensation, insufficient transparency about it, and infuriating periods........

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