Despite a poll showing that Democrats' proposed congressional pay hike has outraged the public, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thinks taxpayers ought to be giving her a $4,500 salary hike anyway on her $174,000 annual paycheck ... not just because everyone deserves a raise, but more important, to keep her honest.

It's not just that she seeks to justify that pay hike for herself by arguing that she actually wants all workers to get a pay hike (even those "unwilling to work" one can logically infer) and thinks her own hike ought to go through because of that. It's also that she supports the $15 minimum wage, so that justifies an extra $4,500 in her pay packet on her $178,000 salary, which comes to a lot more than $15 an hour.

All by themselves, those issues are problematic - what kind of raise should workers who've been laid off because a $15 minimum wage has been enacted get? How much is a raise x $0? And why should wishing be good enough for workers while Ocasio-Cortez herself is actually getting? And what the heck does a measly $15 minimum wage have to do with someone who's making $174,000 a year, plus perks? Yet Ocasio-Cortez declares the proposed $4,500 pay hike "not even like a raise," topping Nancy Pelosi who took heat last year for declaring $1,000 worker bonuses "crumbs." She's starting to sound like Evita.

Actually, Ocasio-Cortez is a good candidate for a pay cut as Issues & Insights editorialist John Merline notes here:  

 Even without a raise, she’s pulling down three times what the median household makes in her district.

So here’s a modest proposal. Tie AOC’s salary, and everyone else’s in Congress, directly to the incomes of the people they represent.

That would mean, rather than give AOC a raise, she would make just $58,331. That’s the median household income in her district, according to a cool Census tool called My Congressional District.

At that pay, AOC would truly represent New York’s 14th Congressional District. Exactly half the households would make more than her, and exactly half would make less.

Better still, if she wanted a raise, she’d have to see to it that her local economy is thriving and people in her district are gainfully employed, thereby pushing up the median income.

It makes sense, particularly since she chased Amazon and all its high-paid jobs out of her home district.

But the worst of her claim is the canard that more money makes politicians more honest. That saw has been around for awhile, and sometimes African dictatorships with more bureaucrats than money who supplement their salaries with shakedowns is the rationale. Give them more money and watch them turn honest. Ummm...

It's baloney, and one need look no further than Ocasio-Cortez's home state of New York for proof positive it's not.

Last December, New York's state legislators in Albany voted themselves a massive $50,000 salary hike making themselves the highest paid state legislators in the nation by 2012, with $130,000 a year paychecks. It's still a smaller amount than what Ocasio-Cortez makes right now in Congress.

Is the salary hike going to make that Albany bunch honest? And the New York Times notes that New York City Council members make $148,000 a year, still more than the Albany crew does. By Ocasio-Cortez's logic, are they even more honest, based on their higher salaries? What are we to say about Ocasio-Cortez, who's been busted quite a bit for putting her boyfriend on her payroll and holding fundraisers for her campaign without quite telling people about it? Will more money make her more honest?

While we are on the topic of socialism and sharing the wealth, let's turn to socialism-cubed over in Caracas, Venezuela: Did making Hugo Chavez's ignorant and greedy daughter, Rosines Chavez, a billionaire, somehow make that country more honest? The socialist country ranks 168 out of 175 on Transparency International's 2018 Corruption Perceptions Index. Maybe they'll need to expropriate more money to bone up on that honesty score.

Which goes to show that more money is more power, not more honesty. Maybe someone with a bigger salary can shun sleazy little small-time mordida shakedowns with a bigger salary, but as Joe Biden's son has demonstrated, working in a bigger league doesn't stop dishonesty, it just provides bigger opportunities to steal. Ocasio-Cortez must know that as she brays for a bigger piece of the taxpayer pie. What she wants, though, is for all of us deplorables to be content with her call for a $15 minimum wage.