I intend to be president in the year 2020. Whether this will happen is unknown and probably unlikely, but that won't stop me from trying. Afterall, I am 100% confident that I could fix everything wrong with our country in a single term. My first goal will be to balance the budget. The government spends far more money than they need to, and we're the ones suffering for it. Presumably, in order to become president I will first need to become a Congressmen of some sort. Should this happen, on my very first day in Congress I will walk in and propose a bill to cut the salary of Congressmen. The bill should be one page long or less, so everyone will be able to read it easily, not like that 256 page stimulus bill.
So I guess the question becomes: How much should a Congressman make? Congress is filled with people who have been there for years just getting fat off their huge salaries, spending most of their time running for reelection so they can maintain their seats, and, in many cases, not even bothering to show up unless there's a vote; and in that case, they frequently just vote along party lines since most of them can't be bothered to personally read any of the legislation they're actually voting on. These people are a disgrace to democracy, and this sort of behavior needs to be discouraged. The two best ways to handle these would be to have term limits, which I am also for, and to cut the salary. Not just cut the salary, but DRASTICALLY cut the salary to make running for higher office as unappealing as possible. If we can make running for higher office extremely unattractive, we're more likely to only have people running for office who realize that being an elected official is an honour and a privilege and who are interested in actually improving the state of our nation, not in securing themselves a high paying job for life. For this purpose, I think that, conservatively speaking, $60,000 a year would be more than fair compensation for a Congressman. I'd like to go even lower, like $40,000, but like I said I'll be a little more conservative in my budget slashing.
So now it's math time! There are 535 members of Congress. The standard annual salary for a Congressman is $165,200 a year. No one is making less than that, though others are making more; the Speaker of the House, for example, makes $212,000 a year. So if we cut the salary of $165,200 down to $60,000 we save $105,200 per year per Congressman, multiplied by the 535 total members of Congress equals an annual savings of $56,282,000.
That doesn't even include the millions we'll save in pensions.
I can't help but think that Congress being in charge of their own salary was a bad idea
© 2009 by Dr. Jeebus