I check San Francisco City worker salaries on occasion (all public) and there are plenty of people making $300K+ a year for a secure job with a pension and not super stressful.
In my city pay rate is entirely based on tenure. People just starting out for the city have very low pay, people about to retire have insane salaries. Maybe it is more helpful to just generically say compensation and ease of removal needs to compete with the market.
I don’t think if you increased the pay you’d start seeing creative people at the entry level suddenly want to work for the government.
The bigger problem is with elected offices. We as a society aren’t wired to desire change. We generally prefer incumbents and people who maintain the status quo over anyone “radical” which is a dirty word in politics.
I went into the private sector over the public sector solely due to pay. If you do well in the private sector in your first couple of years, your compensation will shoot up. In the public sector your compensation is tied to years of experience so when I wanted to work for the gov, they required me to take a demotion and take only 40% of what I got in the private sector.
