Or maybe the income for politicians should be on-par with any other civil servant. Post workers, trash collection truck drivers, state court clerks, natural park management, it's all civil services.

They argue that being a politician requires having tons of connections and being a "people-person," but that's only because they've made it that way over the past 50 or so years. There's nothing about being a politician that is so essentially different than any other way to serve a government or to help a government serve its people.