Cheap Whores

Let’s put more money in politics

In his 1991 book Parliament of Whores, humorist P.J. O’Rourke offered the most honest summary of democratic governance ever written: “Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.” He’s got a point, but we’ve got a Republic, which means we vote to elect our whores.

Lobbyists, pork barrel spending, back-channel campaign contributions, a no-show job for your sister-in-law’s second cousin, good old-fashioned insider trading. We complain about all of it, then nothing changes. Asking politicians to vote themselves fewer opportunities for skimming off the top—and the bottom—is a losing battle. They’re not going to collectively act against their own interests. Especially when their interests are special.

But maybe we’re fighting the wrong war. Everyone wants to get money out of politics. The easier answer is to put more in.

The Pelosi Problem

Nancy Pelosi has served in Congress since 1987. Her salary, like every rank-and-file member’s, is $174,000 a year. It’s been frozen at that number since 2009. Over nearly four decades of service, her total congressional earnings come to roughly $6 million.

Her net worth is reportedly north of $270 million.

There are exactly two ways to read that. Either she’s one of the sharpest investors in American history—a savant who should be running the world’s most successful hedge fund and making billions, but who selflessly chose public service because she just loves America that much. Or she’s a cheat.

Pick whichever story you prefer. But notice that both readings lead to the same conclusion: something about this system is deeply broken. Either we’re dramatically underpaying someone with world-class financial talent, or we’ve built a system where the only way to get rich in politics is to be dishonest about it. Either way, we shouldn’t be surprised by what we get.

Pelosi isn’t even unusual. She’s just the most visible example of a pattern so common it barely registers as scandal anymore. Enough members of Congress beat the market, often enough, that it strains credulity—the kind of track record that would trigger an SEC investigation if they worked on Wall Street. We’ve built a system where the official compensation is a joke and the real compensation is whatever you can get away with. And then we act shocked with what they get away with.

The Talent Problem

Here’s a question nobody asks: why would anyone competent want the job?

Stephen A. Smith spent months teasing a 2028 presidential run, then killed it on Hannity’s podcast: “I got to give up my money. Yeah, I ain’t giving up my money, Sean.” Smith makes roughly $33 million a year between ESPN and SiriusXM. The President of the United States makes $400,000. To a guy like Smith, that’s not a pay cut. It’s practically nothing.

The point isn’t whether you’d vote for Stephen A. Smith. The point is that the people at the top of their fields—the ones who’ve proven they can build things, manage complexity, command audiences, negotiate under pressure—look at the most powerful job in the country and see an expensive step down. Not a promotion. Not a calling. A financial catastrophe.

We pay the person responsible for a $7 trillion budget, 330 million lives, and the most powerful military in the world less than a mid-tier ESPN personality.¹ It’s less than most tech executives. Congress makes less than the guy who manages your regional Costco distribution center, probably. And then we wonder why the talent pool looks the way it does.

The private sector figured this out a long time ago. You get what you pay for. Offer below-market compensation and you get two kinds of candidates: zealots who flame out, and grifters who plan to make up the difference on the back end. And since the zealots flame out, we mostly get the second kind.

Cheap at the Price

It’s cheaper to just pay them. Pay every member of Congress and every cabinet member $50 million a year.

There are 535 voting members of Congress, a president, a vice president, and roughly 25 cabinet-level officials. Call it 562 people. At $50 million each, that’s $28 billion a year.

The federal government spent $7.1 trillion last year. Twenty-eight billion is 0.4% of that. Less than half a penny on the dollar. It is, in the most literal sense, a blip on the budget—the kind of line item that would get folded into “other” in a detailed pie chart.

For that price, you get three things.

First, you get talent. Real talent. The kind of people who currently look at a congressional salary and laugh. When the job pays $50 million, you’re not just attracting public servants—you’re attracting people who’ve built companies, managed billion-dollar portfolios, run hospitals and universities, led engineering orgs. People who are currently solving hard problems in the private sector because that’s where they pay talented people proportionately to their competence. Make governing competitive with Goldman Sachs and you’ll get Goldman Sachs-caliber people competing for the job. Some of them might even be honest.

Second, even if they’re not, you get independence. When a member of Congress makes $50 million a year, a lobbyist’s million-dollar campaign donation just doesn’t curry much favor. You can’t buy a nine figure politician for seven figures. The entire economics of influence shift when the people you’re trying to buy are already rich. A congressman making $174,000—frozen, by the way, since the iPhone 3G—is one bad election away from being financially vulnerable. A congressman making $50 million has “fuck you” money. Which is precisely what we want them saying to lobbyists.

Third, and most importantly: you get integrity. Right now, we ask public servants to take a vow of poverty and then act surprised when it turns out they didn’t mean it. The honest people see it as a step down, so the dishonest step up. Moralizing about corruption doesn’t dissuade immoral people. Pay them enough that the legitimate compensation dwarfs whatever they could skim, and the graft doesn’t go away—but it stops being the primary business model.

$50 million attracts talented people, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll care if the budget balances.

Better Incentives

So give them a reason to care: pay them a percentage of whatever surplus they generate.

The federal deficit last year was $1.8 trillion. Offer every member of Congress and the cabinet 10% of any surplus they produce. The other 90% goes to paying down the debt, and once the debt’s retired, into a sovereign wealth fund.

Under this system, a balanced budget pays them nothing extra. But turn that $1.8 trillion deficit into a $500 billion surplus, and suddenly each of those 562 officials takes home an $89 million bonus. Generate a trillion-dollar surplus and they’re each making an extra $178 million a year—hedge fund money, without having to hedge. And the rest of us get to hand a debt-free America to our children.

Would they game it? Of course they would. They’d game it furiously. The fear is that they’d gut services and put people on the street to juice the number. But they still have to get elected. A congressman who shutters the local VA hospital to pad his bonus check doesn’t have a long career. The games they’d actually play would be the ones that generate surpluses without losing votes—cutting waste, growing the economy, collecting revenue efficiently. Right now they game the system to funnel money to donors and secure “consulting” gigs. They’re going to play games. The question is which set of games do we want?

The Wealth Fund

Today the federal government manages $39 trillion in debt. There is nothing to invest, nothing to steer, nothing to grow. The entire job of fiscal management is figuring out which special interests to keep paying when there’s no money left, and how much more to borrow to do it. It’s a financial triage operation, minus the financial and triage skills.

Norway—a country of 5.5 million people—runs a $2.2 trillion sovereign wealth fund. It owns roughly 1.5% of every publicly listed company on Earth. The fund returned $247 billion in profit in 2025 alone. That’s not tax revenue. That’s investment income, generated by a pool of national wealth that compounds year after year.

Imagine the United States built something similar. Not overnight—it took Norway 35 years to build up that balance. But here’s the surprising part: Norway never paid off their debt first. Norway started the fund in 1990 carrying debt, and they’re carrying debt today. The fund didn’t replace the debt. It ran alongside it. Surpluses went into the fund. Debt got serviced separately. The two were never treated as a sequence.

At American scale, a sovereign wealth fund with an equal value per person would be worth roughly $140 trillion. At the fund’s historical average return of 6.6%, that’s $9.3 trillion a year in investment income—nearly double what the federal government currently collects in taxes. No taxes required. Borrow a trillion at 4%, deploy it at 6.6%, and the spread is the return. That’s called leverage.

And yes, there would be graft. Politicians would steer investments toward favored industries, connected firms, allied nations. There would be backroom deals and influence peddling and all the same corruption we have now.

But here’s the difference: right now, the graft is parasitic. Politicians are skimming from the bottom of a debt hole—and they keep digging. Steering trillion-dollar investments is a lot more lucrative than spending money you don’t have. With a wealth fund, the backroom deals would be with people deploying real capital into real assets. The corruption would be a tax on growth, not a tax on you.

It’s still graft. But it’s a better kind.

The Oldest Profession

The instinct to purify politics—to somehow extract the self-interest from a system built entirely on self-interest—has failed for as long as anyone’s been trying. Every ethics reform, every disclosure requirement, every campaign finance law has been met with creative workarounds by the very people the laws were supposed to constrain. The fox keeps redesigning the henhouse, and we keep acting surprised when chickens go missing.

Maybe the answer isn’t a more virtuous fox. Maybe it’s a henhouse where the fox is already so well-fed that the chickens aren’t worth the effort.

You don’t fix corruption by eliminating incentives. You fix it by making the legitimate incentives so large that the corrupt ones stop mattering. Pay them enough that the job attracts talent instead of grifters. Structure the compensation so their financial interests align with ours. Give them something worth managing instead of a pile of IOUs.

O’Rourke was right. Every government is a parliament of whores. And who wants the cheap kind?

1. Ok, maybe top-tier, but ESPN isn’t what it used to be.