Should Legislators Make MORE Money?

A proposal (by a legislator) to cut legislative pay was dead on arrival this week. 

A more sensible proposal would be to shrink the number of legislators to, say, 75, throw them all into a single chamber and pay our professional, unicameral legislature a decent wage. Under this proposal -- known as the McEnroe Plan -- legislators would not be allowed to have other employment while they served. At the moment, they do, which creates a spider web of mostly unaddressed conflict of issue problems. They work for all kinds of legislative stakeholders and recuse themselves only at knifepoint.

This is not known as the LeBeau Plan because I proposed this before he did and because my plan more pointedly addresses the ethical deficiencies of the current system. Fewer legislators would, by the way, mean fewer people petitioning the executive branch for high-paying jobs to jack up the home stretch of their pensions. A hard-to-document benefit but a real one.

I'm willing to go with LeBeau's salary number, $60K.