Comment by SHOwnsYou | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SHOwnsYou | Hacker News Reader

Working as an elected official is much more stressful than it may appear -- Their every move is analyzed, they are accountable for every word they speak, and threats are commonplace. And all of these things drive up the wages required to take the job.

Also I believe you're grossly overstating the other "rewards" for elected officials. For starters, re-election is limited in several cases by term limits. Furthermore, I don't think any elected official (save President and the like) receive any more respect, admiration, or congratulations for their jobs and if anything, actually receive much less.

Finally, I don't want people that do not have demonstrable success in other areas of their life (or as you refer to them - "poor people") running my town or my country. A high salary serves as a psychological barrier to keep successful people interested and others disinterested. I want to keep those barriers as high as possible, even if I get some false positives.

All of this may be true, but I'd like to see the public record where legislature took a look at the existing candidates for elected official, didn't like the results, and decided to raise salaries in order to improve the candidates.

My guess is that it didn't happen that way at all. Instead, the legislature voted to increase salaries for itself, and no one bothered to ask questions. Now we have retrospective justifications that it's hard so there were no candidates until salaries were raised, but I just don't see that happening anywhere.

Fortunately it doesn't need to explicitly happen for us to still derive benefits as if it did.

You're taking everything way too literally also. There is more than just black and white you refuse to see it. No good candidates until salaries were raised... That's not what I said nor what I meant, and I think you're fully aware of that. Obviously that isn't true because small towns with limited or no budgets for elected officials still have people running. However, I think you'd be hard pressed to convince someone to put up with the scrutiny and death threats that come along with being the mayor of a big city for no compensation (Bloomberg is the huge exception).

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