States where lawmaking is part-time work have a better record of handling taxpayers’ money.
Late last year the New York Committee on Legislative and Executive Compensation concluded that state lawmakers in Albany were overworked and underpaid. The committee, appointed by the Legislature itself, recommended a hefty raise. Legislators are set to earn $110,000 in base salary this year, up from $79,500 in 2018. In 2021 their salaries will rise to $130,000—more than double the state’s median household income.
That might seem like typical New York political audaciousness. In fact the raises are part of a nationwide progressive movement to transform state lawmakers into a “professionalized” elite who earn most of their money from public work. Well-paid political professionals, the argument goes, are less susceptible to corruption and give citizens better government. It’s a nice theory but certainly hasn’t been the case in New York, where lawmakers are already well-compensated but the Legislature is dysfunctional.
The move toward professionalization is part of a campaign against citizen legislators—the part-time, nonprofessional lawmakers who have populated state legislatures since the early days of the republic. As the size of government has grown, states have gradually moved away from this model. Today, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 14 states continue to have part-time legislatures. Another 26 have adopted what’s called hybrid models, where lawmakers spend a considerable amount of their time on state work but still earn much of their income from other jobs. Ten states have converted to full-time legislatures—including California, New York and Illinois—where salaries average more than $80,000 a year.
Political insiders and academics claim that “professionalized” equals better. Full-time legislators are more responsive to their constituents because they have greater political ambitions than part-timers, argued political scientist Cherie Maestas in a 2000 paper. In 2014, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez—then a Harvard doctoral candidate in government and social policy and now a Columbia professor—published a peer-reviewed article claiming to find that the more legislators are paid, the less likely they are to pass bills that reflect “corporate” influences. A 2017 Huffington Post article declared that professionalizing legislatures is a “progressive policy.”
What these studies and reports don’t account for is that voters in states that pay legislators the most are less happy with their representatives than voters in states that pay less. The fundamental task of state government is to write and manage budgets that spend taxpayers’ money. So-called professional legislatures like New York’s haven’t been good at that.
A recent Pew study found that over the past 15 years 10 states consistently spent more than they took in, relying on debt and gimmicks to keep their budgets afloat. The list of deficit spenders is filled with states that pay their legislators generously, including California, New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey. By contrast, the states ranking at the bottom in terms of legislator pay—including Wyoming, Utah, North Dakota and Montana—have balanced their budgets consistently during the last 15 years.
States with the most “professionalized” legislators also have some of the worst-managed government pension systems. California’s Legislature is the best-paid in the country—Golden State lawmakers earn base pay of $111,059 plus $192 for every day they attend sessions in Sacramento. In 2018, according to a California Senate report, lawmakers received an average of $34,000 in tax-free per diem payments. For years California’s well-paid professional lawmakers refused to fund adequately the retirement benefits they granted state workers and teachers. Today the California pension system owes more than $170 billion in unfunded liabilities, which local governments are struggling to pay off.
Illinois—the state with the fifth-highest lawmaker salaries—has the nation’s worst-funded retirement system, with $141 billion in debt and only 40% of the money it needs to satisfy coming obligations. In Pennsylvania, whose Legislature is paid better than any except California’s, the state’s retirement system is only 53% funded with $68 billion in debt.
Voters could be forgiven for wondering how much worse part-time legislatures would have done.
Still, the momentum for more professionalization grows. Last April the minority leader of the Arkansas Senate lamented that pay raises engineered by a state panel were part of an effort to convert Arkansas’s part-time Legislature into a full-time body. A February article in the Tampa Bay Times complained that Florida’s current part-time body was composed of the state’s “elite” who didn’t represent ordinary citizens. It argued that a full-time Legislature would better serve the state. But a legislature of career politicians is itself an elite body that would struggle to represent the concerns of ordinary citizens.
In addition to pay increases, the New York panel also proposed putting strict limits on how much legislators can earn from outside sources. It says this will help address Albany’s corruption problem. But a lawsuit filed in state Supreme Court by the nonprofit Government Justice Center says the commission doesn’t have the power to enforce such restrictions. Sen. George Amedore, who runs a family construction company in upstate New York, argues that such income limits would exclude people like small-business owners who had “real world” work experience from serving in the Legislature.
Then again, it’s been years since anybody described Albany government as in touch with the real world.
This piece originally appeared at The Wall Street Journal
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Steven Malanga is the George M. Yeager Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a senior editor at City Journal.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal