Pay for Play?

Big Mouth

How about a new system where politicians are paid a basic 30k a year say and then are paid bonuses purely on how well they have worked. So if Fine Gail are elected then they are held to their manifesto promises etc if the economy starts performing their wages increase.

An independent counsel of ex-judges and ceo's could examine the work done and commitments delivered to the people. I'd be happy to make a couple of cabinet ministers very wealthy if they got this country back on track and made real progress with Health, Education etc

Shoot me down at will!!

Zombrex

Big Mouth wrote: »

An independent counsel of ex-judges and ceo's could examine the work done and commitments delivered to the people.

Um, ex-judges and ceo's tend not to be the best people to assess the government's performance.

Would you want Sean Fitzpatrick assessing the performance of the government?

There is already a system in place to assess the performance of the government, and it is called democracy

LeixlipRed

Or you could just take the average industrial wage just like all ULA candidates have pledged to do if elected

later12

LeixlipRed wrote: »

Or you could just take the average industrial wage just like all ULA candidates have pledged to do if elected

Apart from the fact that such a move says a lot about the poor quality of candidates available for election for the ULA, I have another concern.

I don't want a Taoiseach or a Minister, or any deputy, who is content with the average industrial wage. If I was hiring two candidates for a job, and I asked both what they thought they were worth, and one said 20k and the other said 200,000k, I'd be far more interested in the second guy. We should seek out high achievers with high expectations who are not happy just to get by and survive either in their own personal lives or in their professional lives. I would like a leader who has high expectations for himself and for his career and for his performance, is that so much to ask?

Floppybits

I was only discussing this last night. I would like to see all TD's on a basic wage probably not the average industrial wage but not the wages they are on at the moment. Then based on how well the country is doing will depend on whether they get a bonus.

Also its about time that the President and the Seanad are used a bit more in terms of picking these independant committees. It work along the lines of the Taosieach nominating people they think would be good for an independent committee, then the Seanad interviews them and decides on the best candidates and then these are sent onto the president for approval where the president can also quiz on investigate the nominees.

Zombrex

later10 wrote: »

Apart from the fact that such a move says a lot about the poor quality of candidates available for election for the ULA, I have another concern.

I don't want a Taoiseach or a Minister, or any deputy, who is content with the average industrial wage. If I was hiring two candidates for a job, and I asked both what they thought they were worth, and one said 20k and the other said 200,000k, I'd be far more interested in the second guy. We should seek out high achievers with high expectations who are not happy just to get by and survive either in their own personal lives or in their professional lives. I would like a leader who has high expectations for himself and for his career and for his performance, is that so much to ask?

I think the point was to give the politician the incentive to raise the average national wage through doing good politics. They improve the economics of the country, their wage rises, and vice versa.

Not saying I agree with the idea, but it isn't based on the idea that the politician only thinks they are worthy that amount. If anything it is saying they are confident they will do really well, thus increasing their wage.

Manach

The OP's idea has historical precedent, in that the Athenians used to check the performance of their politicians by a council of elders. I'd say retired judges, who on the whole, would fit the bill as they've spent their professional likes dealing with unsavory types so therefore could deal with Politicians.

carrick76

Thought about this too but how do you evaluate how well the country is doing. Reducing the debt? Budget surplus? Well that would mean they forget about welfare aspects of government and introducing quality of life measures. How could you measure and attribute a bonus to something like the smoking ban, or the quality of education?

If you held them to their manifesto that could be a disaster as they target the 'low hanging fruit' to gain most of their bonus or if the situation changed drastically like since the last election.

Would love to see some incentives as i too wouldn't have a problem with a minister getting a few million if they did something to improve life in this country.

A referendum to assess ministers performance every year is obviously impractical but you could imagine a day when its done online or something

hardCopy

Wicknight wrote: »

I think the point was to give the politician the incentive to raise the average national wage through doing good politics. They improve the economics of the country, their wage rises, and vice versa.

Not saying I agree with the idea, but it isn't based on the idea that the politician only thinks they are worthy that amount. If anything it is saying they are confident they will do really well, thus increasing their wage.

If we had a system like that for the last 10 years then all the Fianna Failers would be retiring now after 10 years of driving wages to unsustainable levels and leaving the next guys to come in and manage the bust on lower wages.

Oh wait....

I do like the idea of making our TDs more accountable, I just don't see an easy solution, except of course for punishing them in the election.

markpb

later10 wrote: »

If I was hiring two candidates for a job, and I asked both what they thought they were worth, and one said 20k and the other said 200,000k, I'd be far more interested in the second guy. We should seek out high achievers with high expectations who are not happy just to get by and survive either in their own personal lives or in their professional lives. I would like a leader who has high expectations for himself and for his career and for his performance, is that so much to ask?

The current Mayor of New York earns $1 a year in salary and lives of his previous earnings. Maybe he's not a good choice, should New Yorkers have rejected him?

cavedave

I do not see why judges would have a good view on how well politicians have done. You could take a market based view on how well they have one and end up with something close to futarchy.

Another way of thinking about this is why don't politicians take the 100k a year but hand back 70k if they break a particular election promise? You could have posters with how much they really believed and cared in each promise

Illiteracy will drop 3% or I lose 10K

Crime down 5% or I lose 20K

GDP up 1% or I lose 40K

This wont happen I believe because people want politicians to be hypocrites. They want to vote for one who claims to care about illiteracy but not actually have to go through with the policies that might be required to bring about improvements. "We prefer the hypocrisy of democracy where they tell us nice sounding things, making it look like we support them, but then actually do what we really want done."

LeixlipRed

later10 wrote: »

Apart from the fact that such a move says a lot about the poor quality of candidates available for election for the ULA, I have another concern.

I don't want a Taoiseach or a Minister, or any deputy, who is content with the average industrial wage. If I was hiring two candidates for a job, and I asked both what they thought they were worth, and one said 20k and the other said 200,000k, I'd be far more interested in the second guy. We should seek out high achievers with high expectations who are not happy just to get by and survive either in their own personal lives or in their professional lives. I would like a leader who has high expectations for himself and for his career and for his performance, is that so much to ask?

Haha, that made me laugh. Are you aware that the ULA comprises of mostly socialist parties? And that the vast majority of such people don't really aspire to materialistic measures of their performance?

Nehaxak

LeixlipRed wrote: »

Haha, that made me laugh. Are you aware that the ULA comprises of mostly socialist parties? And that the vast majority of such people don't really aspire to materialistic measures of their performance?

He has merit in what he said, albeit in a commercial business sense rather than a political sense (as I see it anyway).

What tends to happen is that people will apply nuances from the private sector to the political system and think one is better or worse than the other.
Whereas imo, the political system should be set alone and stand on it's own merits, separate even from the public sector (so to speak).

Someone with high achievements in the political life (taken from a private sector view) may not be the best placed person to be involved in running a country as in the private sector it's put number 1 first, whereas in the political sector it should be putting the country and the people first in a social sense, rather than for their own personal monetary benefit.

Zombrex

hardCopy wrote: »

If we had a system like that for the last 10 years then all the Fianna Failers would be retiring now after 10 years of driving wages to unsustainable levels and leaving the next guys to come in and manage the bust on lower wages.

Oh wait....

I do like the idea of making our TDs more accountable, I just don't see an easy solution, except of course for punishing them in the election.

Neither do I, like I said I don't agree with the idea. I was just pointing out that the purpose of the idea isn't to say that a TD position is not worth much.

eoin5

I'd see it as more of a solidarity thing rather than an incentive, were all in this boat together etc. I'd be more worried about the expenses really.

later12

LeixlipRed wrote: »

Haha, that made me laugh. Are you aware that the ULA comprises of mostly socialist parties? And that the vast majority of such people don't really aspire to materialistic measures of their performance?

Your post also made me laugh. It's a laugh a minute on here. Because my concern would be that while it is perfectly acceptable for one to reject aspiration to material wealth or materialistic measures of their performance, the danger in electing such individuals to political office is that they fail to understand that their is not a way of life that most people generally do aspire to.
Most people do aspire to wealth, and there is nothing wrong with that. In fact I would say that is a creditable aspiration and the aspiration of material benefit was probably what drove the first humans to leave the darkness of the cave and go beyond the frontier into the unknown and therefore into social progress. That is another matter and I should not get carried away.

In any case, I am merely remarking that I would tend to prefer a candidate who thought he was worth more than the average industrial wage.

In terms of bonuses, which is another issue, there would have to be a clawback system. It would be all to easy to ignite short term heat in the economy, i.e. to promote short boom and bust cycles in order to be the beneficiary of a financial reward upon leaving office, or while in office for whatever duration.

LeixlipRed

Humans left caves to become wealthy did they? I stopped reading after that. Accumulate your money and your cars and your mortgages and see how happy it makes you. Then think of someone not so lucky in the world. And you'll call them lazy right?

nesf

LeixlipRed wrote: »

Humans left caves to become wealthy did they? I stopped reading after that. Accumulate your money and your cars and your mortgages and see how happy it makes you. Then think of someone not so lucky in the world. And you'll call them lazy right?

He said material benefit not wealth, big difference there. Material benefit covers the gamut from cars and mortgages to simply better forms of lighting, heating and better quality food and more of it.

I'd disagree with him about people aspiring to wealth, I think most aspire to gain more material benefit in the broader sense (for which wealth is merely a route to). I know I aspire to a better standard of living in terms of nutrition, heating and other such and I really doubt you could find many people who don't share such aspirations. Actually just compare us to a generation or two ago and ignore all the extraneous stuff like mortgages and fancier cars and what's been focused on and collected has been improvements to basic stuff like heating (central heating was a luxury for my parents generation), food (my kids eat better than I did at their age nutritionally speaking) etc. Despite being a lower earner than my father was at my age in terms of society positional terms I'm far better off than he ever was in terms of the basics never mind any of the fancy stuff.

3DataModem

Here's another crazy idea:

We should have less TDs (less than 100) and pay them MORE. If we jacked it up to say 500k per year then we'd have a shot at the best and brightest, not just the ones who want to be "politicians".

Nehaxak

"Best and brightest" what exactly ?
It's not like you can just go out and advertise a vacancy.
Either someone wants to become a politician or they don't, you can't just dangle a high wage packet around as the main incentive in the hope you'll get more applying for the position as all you'll end up with is even worse than what we've had to put up with so far, and they were only in it for less than half of the 500k you'd propose.
I'd rather that 50M per year you proposed in wages were spent on political education starting even as low as primary school level. We might then actually get people interested in political aspirations for when they're older, rather than for the most part what it is now, family dynasties and friend of a friend type crap.

NSNO

So the OP wants the democratically elected representatives of the Irish people put in a position in which they can be financially held to ransom by unelected appointees.


Right