Something I thought of today that seemed relevant to this thread:
Cutting politicians' salaries, an emotionally-appealing proposal often met with cheers, would make things worse. Running a campaign is basically a full-time job that pays you in negative dollars. You have to quit your job for several months, which already requires being relatively wealthy, and then you have to spend most of your campaign time doing fundraising. And then once you're in Congress, now you have to have two residences, one in Washington and one at home, which is expensive and complicated. And also you're still doing fundraising most of the time so you can be reelected.
The lower Congressional salaries go, the more true it will be that you have to be rich or be indebted to rich powerful friends to get into the government. The less money Congresspeople get from their salaries, the more willing they'll be to take money from lobbyists. And lobbyists are the root cause of what the Tea Party, the Occupiers, and everyone in general are ****eded off about. Big government, big business, fascism, communism, whatever you call it, it all comes from the symbiotic relationship between the permanent political class and the permanent wealthy class, and the more we try to cut the umbilical cord between the government and the politicians, the stronger their bond with big business will be.
If we want to get "normal people" in the government, then in addition to high Congressional salaries, we need a better, fairer form of public funding for campaigns. This would probably require a constitutional amendment, as this is definitely not an enumerated power of the federal government, and there would be some important First Amendment issues to work out and clarify (Does funding a candidate like Bachmann or Santorum violate the Establishment clause? Does taking my money to support a candidate I don't support violate my free speech and free exercise rights, particularly if an issue like abortion or gay marriage is involved?). We could at least start, though, by addressing the issue with Congresspeople having to keep two residences, by doing most Congress things through videoconferencing and only convening in person a few times a year for major legislation. This may also have fringe benefits, such as keeping representatives closer to their constituents, saving a little on DC's electric bill, making lobbyists' jobs harder by giving them 500 different places to go to, and maybe even getting reliable high-speed internet to places that wouldn't get it otherwise, which would help out the economy in general -- we really need to get with the program on internet coverage compared to the rest of the world, and you have to admit, if the government hadn't propped up the telephone industry, there would be large swathes of the country that to this day would not have basic landline service, for the same reasons that in the 20 years I've lived at this address, the local cable company has refused to extend the network that they have about three miles down the road from us so we could get service from them (unless we pay the few thousand dollars it would cost to run the cable out ourselves).
