Politicians are out of control. Their yearly salaries are more than an average person will see in a lifetime. They have been entrusted with the power to regulate their own salaries, and have grossly violated that trust to live in their own luxury.

Since those who rule in the city do so because they own a lot, I suppose they're unwilling to enact laws to prevent young people who've had no discipline from spending and wasting their wealth, so that by making loans to them, secured by the young people's property, and then calling those loans in, they themselves become even richer and more honored.

We should consider paying the people who run our elections more, as well as giving some of them more professional training. We pay many of the election officials in some of our rural counties less than the janitor at the local school. Sue Woody, who had served as the clerk of Park County, Indiana, resigned last year because she couldn’t make it on her salary of $22,000. She was responsible for running both the court and the election systems for her county.

While big corporations make huge, tax-free profits, taxes for the everyday working person skyrocket. While politicians take free trips around the world, those same politicians cut back food stamps for the poor. While politicians increase their salaries, millions of people are being laid off. This city is on the brink of bankruptcy, and yet hundreds of thousands of dollars are being spent on this trial. I do not understand a government so willing to spend millions of dollars on arms, to explore outer space, even the planet Jupiter, and at the same time close down day care centers and fire stations.

When I became a reporter in the 60s in California, one of the very first lessons I learned was, your supposed to be watchdogging the government.... looking out for the taxpayers. If the politicians want to spend more money, why? What's it for? Why am I going to give up more of my sustenance to the government? If the government needs it, let's hear the case for it. ...[N]ow we have city councils in big cities in the United States where no reporter goes for months at a time to the meetings; where the city budget doesn't get covered at all.

Leadership starts with our choices. That’s why I decided that no one on my staff will make less than $52k/year. It’s likely one of the highest entry-level salaries on the Hill. We pinch pennies elsewhere, but it’s worth every dime to pay a living wage.

The bankers got the free use of the money a part of the time, the brokers another part: the officials made money, and the brokers received a fat commission.

The grand fauconnier of France was an officer of great eminence; his annual salary was four thousand florins; he was attended by fifty gentlemen, and fifty assistant falconers; he was allowed to keep three hundred hawks, he licensed every vender of hawks in France, and received a tax upon every bird sold in that kingdom, and even within the verge of the court; and the king never rode out upon any occasion of consequence without this officer attending upon him.

News from the White House that $500,000 was the cap the government wants to put on executive salaries at the banks receiving bailout cash had some on Wall Street and along the plush corridors of Manhattan's swank Upper East Side hollering "Unfair!"..."You Try to Live on 500K in This Town" was the tongue-in-cheek headline in last Sunday's New York Times... But they work hard for their multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses, perks and solid gold benefits, complained some of the financiers. Besides, executive headhunters say, the money giants just can't get good help for anything less.

It is a fantasy to believe that you punish politicians by throwing them out of office. It is when they leave office that they start making the real money.

In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations

Bankers get bonuses... the upper echelon get anywhere from ten million up to a hundred million, and the President of the United States makes like four hundred grand a year. So right there. I've watched enough wrestling to see a rigged game... There's like people with Youtube channels making as much as the leader of the free world. So I just think he's set up to be bribed, and, uh, you act accordingly. So basically anybody who comes at me going, you know, "The conservative right or these liberals..." like, I just zone out. I can't even talk to you if you're actually looking at it like those are two (separate) choices that you're getting. You're not... Once you get past a certain level, it just seems like... you've jumped in the river and you act accordingly or you get that convertible ride in Dallas.

The Wall Street banker thinks it shameful to raise a department clerk’s salary from $1500 to $1800 a year, but every man who draws a salary himself says: “That’s all right. I wish it was me.” And he feels very much like votin’ the Tammany ticket on election day, just out of sympathy. <small>p. 6</small>

It was not the fashion for politicians who aspired to elective office to live ostentatiously, no matter how much money they had. If they loved luxury—and most of them did—they indulged that love in ways less publicly obvious than by living in mansions. The public believes what it thinks it sees.