A “local-interest” piece in my local rag this past Sunday noted a bizarre phenomenon occurring these days on Capitol Hill.

Congressional staffers, those college kids and twentysomethings who secretly run the place, are wearing expensive clothes!

Yup, you heard it here first (well, Post first here second), scandal on the Hill, expensive clothes and accessories among Washington’s non-elite.

How can this be? Many of those people aren’t even paid, and the ones who are get laughably-low internship stipends that barely cover sublets in this increasingly-expensive town of ours.

You see (drum roll)… most of those kids have… rich parents!

Gasp.

The author notes the problem. These are the people who run our society. (That’s not a stretch: the idea is to parlay your internship into a full-time gig, and most of them do.) So our pool of applicants to run our society is a group of people with rich parents who don’t really need to work who’ve never earned anything in their lives and don’t mind spending other people’s money.

Yup, that’s the group of people I want to send my tax dollars to.

Spot on, author. So what’s your solution?

Give more money to those interns and junior staffers!

Yeah, with higher salaries, a greater cross-section of people will go for those internships and be able to spend my money for me. Awesome idea.

While we’re at it, why don’t we just pay everybody in Washington more to be fair about it? After all, they’ve got that big money tree there, right? Might as well spread it around a bit.

Awesome.