Tom’s Garage

I found an interesting article this morning from Matt Welch while browsing the excellent Instapundit (Glenn’s original post here). Matt points out that we should not confuse “professional politics with service”. What is so brave and partiotic about making more money than most Americans will ever see, having the best healthcare in the country and retirement plans that simply don’t exist for the regular citizens? All of this while putting off your duties in pursuit of continued or additional power when election time comes around. A brave and selfless act can be found in the likes of John Chambers from Cisco. When his company was faced with job cuts he decided to forego his own salary of $1million/year so that fewer jobs would be cut. Sure, Mr. Chambers has made a ton of money already so he can afford to make this decision but the fact is, he put his money where his mouth was — He’s at the helm and if the company isn’t making the money to continue employment for those under him, he decided to put himself last in line on pay day.

Are our politicians brave, selfless servants of the people? I’d reserve that sort of label for the CIA operatives who are at risk daily or the people in our armed services who put themselves in danger so we can live with less fear and anxiety.

For me to view the professional politicians as anything other than a drain on our society they’d have to at least:

1. Take a reasonable salary that is more inline with what Middle America sees.
2. Enjoy their healthcare coverage while they’re in office but do not expect it to be paid for by Americans for the rest of their lives.
3. Focus more on how to defend our country and less on whether or not they think I should be doing one thing or another.
4. Hop out of the pockets of special interest groups and make decisions based on what is right instead of what will get them the money they need to win the next election.
5. Impose term limits on themselves so we can get a continual flow of new ideas and lessen the chance of corrupting due to self preservation.
6. If they have substantial personal wealth, don’t take a salary while at the same time taxing us to death.

These are the things that [pipe] dreams are made of.

Tags: You're Not Interested

This entry was posted by tom on Wednesday, July 28th, 2004 at 3:16 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.