You get what you pay for

When it comes to legislative salaries, too

IT IS A truth universally acknowledged that you get what you pay for, whether you’re buying durable goods, professional services or anything else, including skilled labor or even political leadership and responsibility. And that category definitely includes your state representative and senator. Yes, you get what you pay for even in legislators. As usual, a good rule to follow in our private affairs also applies to our public ones.

We once knew an old gentleman who explained that he always bought the best because he couldn’t afford anything else. The cheap and shoddy would not only prove less satisfying in its short life but have to be replaced all too soon.

The same sound advice applies to our legislative and executive leaders, who now have responsibility for overseeing a budget that runs in the billions—almost $3 billion last time we looked, which was last year.

All those billions and how carefully and judiciously they’re spent and for what will deeply affect our lives. Those decisions will be key factors in determining the quality of our people’s health, safety, security, education, employment, environment and just about every other aspect of living in this small, wonderfully varied, and all too often unappreciated state. Not to mention our children’s growth and development. Those are not things to scrimp on, or leave to public servants paid too little to do too much.

Yet for years, for decades if not longer, Arkansas has paid its legislators a paltry sum—a half-laughable, half-contemptible amount, only a token salary, really—for undertaking the greatest responsibilities in a government that is supposed to be responsible.

The result: We got pretty much what we paid for on that cut-rate basis. Like recurrent conflicts of interest, low games with expense accounts, and far more serious scandals. (Remember colorful scamps and frauds like Nick Wilson and Lloyd George? Gentle Reader may have his own favorite miscreant in this long list.)

The pitiable salaries for state legislators and the lack of clear, transparent rules for their expenses, not to mention the general absence of an ethical consciousness in all too many politicians, might as well have been a standing invitation to incompetence and much worse, like outright corruption. Some years there were scandals per diem.

At last the people said Enough and passed a constitutional amendment last year establishing a well-qualified body to set a new pay scale for legislators, complete with a full array of new and clear ethical standards. The only thing wrong with the new setup, which was grounds enough for some of us to oppose it despite all its evident virtues, was that it included a sneaky way to extend term limits under the guise of establishing higher standards. But the people knew best, or at least they get the final say in our system, as they should. And so now Arkansas has a new and better way to pay our public servants—and try to assure that they remain our servants, not just more snouts at the public trough.

Yes, you get what you pay for, and the people of Arkansas deserved much better than the kind of public service we were getting for so long. But now there’s new hope that not just our legislators but the state will do better.

At this point there will be a lot of pious nonsense talked about the value of having a citizen-legislature, and there is value to that idea, but too often the idea of a citizen-legislature is just a high-sounding euphemism for a poorly paid one.

Our legislators’ low pay scale was outdated long ago, as if they were still arriving for legislative sessions on horseback or by steamboat at a graceful antebellum state Capitol with its high columns and great porticos front and back in the Greek Revival style of the 1830s. Or maybe getting knifed on the floor of the state’s House of Representatives during a not so solemn debate on the great issue of how much to pay in bounties for wolf pelts.

It’s still a beautiful old edifice and well worth a guided tour of the museum it has now become and needs to be, and even an occasional legislative session there just for old times’ and nostalgia’s sake. Not to mention the building’s educational value. One of the lessons such a visit should teach us is that oldtime pay scales need to be left to old times, along with duels, slavery and other antebellum barbarities. Because, sure enough, you get what you pay for.

OUR STATE legislators now oversee a huge and intricate budget process, not to mention other responsibilities like the general welfare. Would anyone expect a private corporation, or at least a minimally well-run one, to pay its key leaders so little to do so much, and still find topnotch people to fill key jobs?

Better to face reality and responsibility, not to mention the will of the people, and begin to pay our legislators something closer to what we all hope they will be worth. Which under the new pay scale would now be $39,400 a year (up from only $15,869) and do away with all the tricky expense accounts that just invite trouble as well as embarrassment.

Big decisions await this state and its legislators, certainly much bigger than the penny-ante pay our legislators have been making do with all these years. Enough.

Because you, Citizen and Taxpayer, will surely get what you pay for.