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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

> And that’s a much bigger problem then Mulder and Scully not making rent.

It’s only a problem if you want the government to be spending even more money. They already spend approximately 1/3 of the GDP and that’s plenty big enough for many. If they want to pay people more, change the denominator.

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Plus they have ironclad job security and a pension (which practically no taxpayers get), so it's not directly comparable to private sector salaries.

I believe their point was that FBI agents struggling to cover housing are more susceptible to external payments.

That’s true for all government employees and elected officials.

For Congress specifically, I’m in favor of raising salaries to $1M/year while simultaneously taking a zero tolerance policy on all lobbyist funded excursions. That’ll attract plenty of honest folks as the base salary would be more than enough.

I’m not opposed to this. but a more reliable solution might be extending terms to 6-8 years and then making second terms illegal.

People would still love to hire someone with experience in the highest rungs of government and it would decrease the negative influence of lobbyists on currently serving members.

Yes, but the FBI contains part of the US government's attempts to counter spies and infiltrators, and my understanding is that it's seen as especially important that those people aren't easily bribable.

I would think domestic bribes would be far more likely. Less risk to the agent due to less exposure to a high profile failure. If an agent gets pinched for taking bribes from a business owner or a local sheriff, it's not as big of a scandal as if they took foreign money. And probably easier to set up in the first place.

But what would the motive be there?

I don't think the scandal would be the main concern. The main concern would the life imprisonment that treason/spying, when discovered, usually leads to.

You'd have to ban all private sector employment, book deals, and basically any other means of money transfer. It's impossible.

The only way to stop corruption is to make the incentive structure altogether unattractive. Singapore, for example, has done a world class job doing so and has one of the lowest corruption rates in the world.

How does one measure the corruption rate? What even qualifies as corruption when it's so often "I know it when I see it?"

I'm not sure that math works out, with the amount of pork barrel the government hands out to contractors. Might be a lot cheaper to bring more talent in-house than to pay somebody else's margins.

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