If we want politics to be the kind of arena where you’re attracting and encouraging
really competent people who do a job well because that’s what they’re supposed to
do then you have to pay them a salary that’s commensurate with that.
If I want to hire a software engineer at Google to be world class or if I want to hire someone
at a bank or someone at an environmental firm or someone at a utility that I want to be
really, really, really good I don’t say well, you know, I’ll let these people kind
of pick themselves with the popular vote and then I won’t pay them very much and I’ll
just see how they do.
Singapore is probably the best example.
Singapore pays its elected officials a lot of money on par with what you’d make as,
you know, a banker, a lawyer, a management consultant or something like that.
And so that changes A, the pool if people you are drawing from and B, the way that people
feel about the job.
It’s no longer like well I got into the for public service but it’s really hard
to serve the public.
So I’ll serve myself a little bit and them I’ll do the job in order to enrich myself
now or later.
Instead you have a bunch of people who treat it like a real profession.
Our politics is, in fact, not very professional even though it appears to be from the outside.
Then additionally I would like to say well, you know, wouldn’t it be nice to reward
politicians or officials, government officials if they actually do a good job?
Because right now they get paid exactly the same whether they do really well or do nothing
or do really poorly.
So what about this?
What about let’s say for every piece of legislation, for every project or for every
panel that you’re involved in why don’t we put some measurables on it, right.
Why don’t we decide what are the goals?
What are we trying to accomplish with this new piece of let’s say education legislation?
And if let’s say our goal is to raise the test Scores of U.S. children by 10 percentage
points.
That’s our goal, right.
Why don’t we put a timeframe on it?
Let’s say ten years from now that’s our goal.
Well I would love nothing more as a citizen and as a taxpayer to say that, you know, Secretary
of Education Arnie Duncan – let’s say he’s responsible for this plan and he’s
got, let’s say, 100 or 200 or 500 people working with him.
I would love to treat that like a project, like a goal that’s got a deliverable.
And if they reach that goal ten years from now long after he’s Secretary of Education
we’ll write him a check.
I would love to write Arnie Duncan a check for two million dollars from the U.S. taxpayers
for having taken a job and done it well and accomplished a goal.
That’s the way the real world works, right.
You get hired based on how good you are.
You get paid based on how well you do.
If you don’t do well you get fired or you get paid less.
If we treated politics like more of a profession like it should be we would all be a lot better
off.