We don't pay politicians enough to care about us

"Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome." - Charlie Munger

It's June 2022.

FBI agents walk into a house in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. It belongs a U.S. Senator. But not just any U.S. Senator. It’s the home of the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

They find more than $480,000 in cash. Stuffed in envelopes. Inside jackets. Inside boots.

Then they find the gold bars.

In January 2025, Senator Bob Menendez was sentenced to 11 years for taking bribes and acting as an agent of Egypt.

Yep, "Gold Bar Bob" is yet another politician caught selling out the American people.

He joins a list that includes former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was recorded trying to sell Barack Obama's Senate seat, Speaker Larry Householder, who got 20 years for a $60 million bribery scheme, and Congressman Randy Cunningham who pleaded guilty to taking at least $2.4 million in bribes.

Get this, prosecutors literally found a handwritten "bribe menu" on his congressional note card.

The price list, in his own handwriting, detailed:

Why does this keep happening?

Because we keep voting for it.

To be clear, this isn't a Democrat, Republican or American thing.

It’s a human nature thing.

Watching two hours of House of Cards or Ides of March will teach you more about how congress actually works, than watching 2,000 hours of CSPAN.

Did you know that until 1999, Germany and France let companies deduct bribes paid abroad on their taxes. Bribery wasn't just tolerated. It was a tax write-off.

So when we hand those people billion-dollar decisions and pay them like middle managers, what did we think would happen?

On September 1, Tim Cook handed the Apple CEO job to John Ternus after 15 years.

When he took over in 2011, Apple was worth about $350 billion. Under Cook it grew to roughly $4 trillion.

Shareholders made trillions. And Cook became a billionaire, worth about $3.1 billion.

Nobody is marching in the street about it. He delivered, so he got paid.

Now look at California. It's the world's fourth-largest economy, producing more than $4.5 trillion a year. Roughly Apple-sized.

The man running it makes $245,929.

Imagine if Apple paid Tim Cook like California pays Gavin Newsom.

An underpaid Tim Cook wouldn't have been guaranteed to sell out to Samsung, Google, or Microsoft. But he would have been far more likely to.

We aligned his interests with shareholders, and it worked.

We do the opposite with politicians.

So we get the opposite.

California voters approved high-speed rail in 2008 for $33 billion. Today the San Francisco to LA line is estimated at $126 billion, with service around 2040.

Don’t get me started on homelessness, hospice centers and medical billing.

And in November 2020, while telling Californians to stay home, Newsom attended a lobbyist's 50th birthday dinner at the French Laundry in Napa, where tasting menus there start at $350 a person.

That's not a Newsom problem. That's an incentive problem.

We don’t mind our movie stars making $30M a film or athletes making $50M+ a year.

So why does paying politicians well make us so angry?

It’s because of envy. And envy comes from the ego. And the ego is rooted in two fears: the fear of inadequacy and the fear of losing control.

In a 1998 Harvard School of Public Health survey, people chose between earning $50,000 while others earned $25,000, or earning $100,000 while others earned $200,000. About half picked the $50,000.

They'd take half the money just to stay ahead. We don't just want more. We want more than the other guy.

So we cap their pay to feel better.

Then we pay anyway. Just not on the books. In kickbacks. In bailouts. In laws written for donors instead of us. In massive inefficiency.

That's the Fear Tax at the level of a whole society.

We don't give our senators, congressmen, and presidents the mechanisms to want to serve us.

That's not their fault. It's ours.

So, I’m proposing something courageous and logical; let's design a system that actually recognizes politicians are humans pursuing their own interests.

Let’s pay them legally and above board.

Let’s pay them proportionately when they deliver.

Let’s make the most profitable thing a politician can do also be the right thing for the people they serve.

We’ve already seen what happens when we don’t, so what do we have to lose?

Here's your reflection for the week:

Where in your own life are you letting envy make a decision that costs you more than it saves?

Here's your challenge for the week:

Read Apple's announcement of Tim Cook's transition. Then ask: what would it look like if your representative were paid on results like that?

With courage,

Jonathan