I understand this, but at the same time the concept of this to me is absolutely wild.

We see this in the UK, the exact same argument. Yet I was paid more to manage a small tech team than an MP for fewer hours. You actively disincentivise people like me from taking public positions. I'm doing tech contracting and earn more than Prime Minister.

The UK gets about a trillion dollars a year in, and spends more. The US takes in something like five trillion dollars.

An exceptionally small improvement in improving the economy pays for itself indefinitely because these countries are absolutely enormous. Our MPs are paid about 90k/year, if you could improve the tax take of the government by 0.1% by improving the economy in some way *once* you could pay them £1M/year *tax free* and you could pay that *forever* even if future people aren't as good they're just not actively detrimental. This is also for paying people who aren't actually making big decisions, just the elected representatives.

Money should not be an issue, missing a good person because of the money is utter insanity given the payback.