Oooo time for me to reveal my hottest take. Politicians are generally very underpaid. When a job puts you under a microscope, involves people yelling at you and inherently lacks job security it better be pretty well paid. And yet any electable, competent politician could turn around and make at least 2-3x as much doing something else and keep having weird sex without newspapers writing stories about them. No one who is rational and not evil would ever go into politics just for money of it so all that’s left is the corrupt, the truly dumb and the unpractical idealists.

If you want better politicians then pay for it. Give them all multi-million dollars salaries, ban them from stock exchange, and keep paying them even if they lose.

Only issue is we’re supposed to be their boss. Americans elect representatives to do the job of representing us. If they don’t do their job they shouldn’t be paid, and overall public support for representatives is incredibly low because of the behavior you’re advocating to pay them off in order to avoid doing.

Not sure where you work but if I stopped doing my job I’d expect a firing, not a raise.