Sometimes I feel like congress and representatives should make the minimum wage of the area they represent. Might encourage them to actually improve things for the people.
The history of unpaid and low-paid legislatures (of which there is quite a lot) does not really support this idea.
Congress gets paid like 174k a year. Sure, it's a lot of money compared to the US median, but anyone who can get elected to Congress can earn that elsewhere.
For tech, 174k isn't even a big salary; we're talking an industry where a starting SE salary at a FAANG is around there. That's not a huge paycheck for a 24/7 job like federal politics.
You're describing what we already have.
The argument being made is that if you're going to pay people a low wage, they'll just increase it by trading some of the power they yield in exchange for money for themselves, which is the problem we're trying to solve for :)