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Paying legislators more not solution
Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2011 | 2:01 a.m.
Jon Ralston’s column in the Sunday edition of the Las Vegas Sun, "A modest proposal to fix the Legislature" of the Las Vegas Sun is mistitled. How can a proposal to increase the size and cost of state government — with no assurance and little prospect that it will be better — be considered “modest?”
A year-round, highly paid state legislature with attendant highly paid staff would merely be bigger and more expensive, not better and probably not less corrupt.
Corruption is a matter of character, not pay rate.
As David Schwartz’s “Memo from Carson City” observed in the same edition, conflicts of interest will always exist in elected bodies.
It is the duty of the elected representatives to consider the best interests of their constituents in the broader context of the best interests of the state and to be candid and forthcoming explaining their votes.
It is a duty of the press to expose those legislators who are less than candid or forthcoming about all that influences their actions.
And it is the duty of the electorate to hold legislators accountable at elections. All groups fail, to greater or lesser degree, every election cycle; that is the nature of a democracy. But it is unlikely that paying legislators more would make the press more diligent or the electorate more concerned.
It is not a given that more, or more expensive, government is better government. Let’s not give them more incentive.
Discussion: 11 comments so far…
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How about a pay increase for Grandma on her Social Security?
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She's had none for two years ... she needs to cover her cigarettes, happy hour and home supply of Jack Black - you don't want grandma mad at you do you?
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Ola - It may be more prudent to lower the pay of these legislatures - or maybe Keating Five Sen McCain and dig in his billion dollar pocket and those $400 loafers and offer to fund them out of the kindness of his heart .... oops ... forgot, he has NO heart this war monger.
Full time legislature with higher pay? Look next door in California where I used to live, for how effective that is. California has the same problems Nevada has, only on a much larger scale... and they have a 'broad tax base', (they tax everything) too. So much for the ideas Mr. Ralston and others propose.
The problems here are that gaming and mining own the legislature, the legislature spends almost everything that comes in and saves very little for poor economic times (which always come from time to time) and is very wasteful in what it spends.
Having a bigger and more expensive legislature and 'broadening the tax base', which is code for more and higher taxes, will change none of that.
Michael
Ralston raises some interesting, if mot totally convincing points (And, since when is any proposal of Ralston's modest?). The compensation of legislators is just another example of Nevada governing on the cheap. It requires large expenditures, many multiples of the compensation, to get elected to the legislature and only those who can afford to forego compensation from their usual occupation can afford to serve.
Thus, the more elite elements of society are overrepresnted and others are underrepresented.
frank; have grandma roll her own or buy generic cigarettes. she wont smoke as much.
We are paying folks a pittance for part-time attention. So how are they going to make ends meet? They are going to "network", "develop contacts", "develop mutual support groups", in short, they are going to do all the thinks that regular folks do (or should be doing) to get ahead. Well, who are they going to do that with? The people around them? Right? And who are the people around them? Why, the folks who want/need something from the Legislature, of course. So we get "soft corruption" -- but that makes it no less corrupt.
It seems to me, therefore, that Ralston's point is well-taken. We can either have an ineffective corrupt part-time Legislature that we pay little -- and who make it up with the "benefits" they can garner from folks willing to help them so they can get what they want/need from the Legislature (No quid pro quo -- of course -- just general benefits ostensibly separated from legislation but actually quite related) or we can pay these folks enough to reduce the temptation and maybe get some benefit from their greater attention to public business.
There is a basic problem with the logic that supports this argument.
Nevada is small pay for legislators + soft corruption, which = more pay for legislators.
California is higher pay for legislators + soft corruption = more pay for legislators.
Legislators, just like every other American want to make 'as much' as they can. You cannot change that equation by increasing their pay. The temptation still exists and some legislators will take advantage.
As voters, if we want less 'soft corruption', we must act accordingly at the voting booth at the next election.
Locally, the RTC bus contract and firemen overtime issues are both examples of 'soft corruption', yet I'll bet you that just about every person that runs for re-election on the County Commission gets re-elected. The same is true of the state legislature.
Until we address these sorts of issues at the ballot box, nothing of consequence will change.
Michael
"It is not a given that more, or more expensive, government is better government."
McIlvaine -- I'm with you on this one.
"The problems here are that gaming and mining own the legislature ... and is very wasteful in what it spends."
wtplv -- the only flaw in your reasoning I can see is industries don't vote. And since this state's economy is driven by these two main industries -- what else is there that comes even close? -- they should have a lot of influence with lawmakers. It's the balancing factor of an involved electorate which is largely absent.
"The compensation of legislators is just another example of Nevada governing on the cheap...the more elite elements of society are overrepresnted and others are underrepresented."
lericgoodman -- I disagree. You're not considering what it is legislatures, including Congress, actually do. All they do is pass laws. Every law they pass means one more thing we are coerced into doing (like being forced to take off our belts and shoes before being allowed into government buildings), or not allowed to do what We were free to do before. This brand of elected officials should never be full time -- if so they'd just be more bureaucrats added to the payroll, and then their interests would be to maintain their jobs, not truly represent us. You got that part right.
Have you ever participated in making or breaking a law? I have. It's a lot like watching hot dogs being made.
Citizen power means We vote them in, and We can vote them out and all that implies. That's the great balancing factor in all this. It still boils down to We the people need to wake up to the fact our kind of government is not just another a spectator sport. The Founders set it up to be very much a hands-on operation. Unfortunately We the people act more like we the herd, and every herd has its predators. Now we are governed by public corporations that have become predatory on the very people they were originally Constituted to serve, and they're actively on the hunt for every one of us. The blame for that rests squarely on the apathetic We.
"I heartily accept the motto, 'That government is best which governs least'; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically." -- Henry David Thoreau 1849 "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience"
Michael, you may be right or it may be that the differences in what it takes to sustain a decent life in CA vs. the very much smaller amount it takes to accomplish that in Nevada accounts for your equation.
The problem in California is caused by (1) a constitutionally mandated supermajority to pass budgets (now changed) which made getting any budget almost impossible, and (2) a constitutionally mandated 2/3rd popular supermajority for any tax or fee increase, which (A) destroyed local government and shifted all power to the State Capital, (B) put all finances into a straight-jacket which has operated to slowly destroy the State in a slow death of a billion cuts, and (C) term limits, which push out of office those legislators who have been around long enough to understand what is really happening and replace them with neophytes. These problems are way beyond anything having to do with the compensation of legislators.
Leric,
All the things you mentioned have happened in California and I experienced some of them until I moved here in 2001.
Just like at the Federal level, we have all allowed government to become so large and powerful and provide so much to so many, that it has become nearly impossible to either 1) raise taxes enough to pay for all of it or 2) cut back on some of what the government provides.
Government doesn't want to raise taxes because that is unpopular. All the people that are provided with assistance from the government don't want to have any of that cut.
Between our representatives not wanting to be unpopular and too many people depending on government, we have arrived at the impasse we now face... at all levels.
Sadly, I just sit here, powerless and pretty much know that until things here degrade (and they will) to a place where the % of Americans not living a good life anymore is at a breaking point, nothing positive will happen.
Michael
KillerB,
I don't expect Gaming and Mining not to have a big influence in the legislature. There are big and important businesses.
That shouldn't mean however that we can't have a state lottery, just because gaming doesn't want one; we can't raise the gaming tax to somewhere between what it is here and what is charged in other states with gaming, just because gaming doesn't want it; and that we can't restructure the mining taxes that were written into the Nevada constitution when the state was alot different than it is today, just because mining doesn't want that.
Michael
Michael, run for office as an independent. Nevada Assembly Districts should have a population of about 64K people, which is just small enough to walk most of the District and shake hands, have small gatherings in people's homes and get by with a limited advertising budget. About $100K should do it.
Ralston????? Why would anyone pay attention to any thing he says?