Famously, Singapore maintains a very effective, clean civil service by paying market rates, and sometimes for some ministers that is actually millions of dollars a year.
Your worth should be based on your skills (meritocracy) - not by winning the lottery and how much people will pay to influence you (luck).
And with deciding "merit" are the kingmakers, or the "meritmakers".
Congratulations. You now have created a new class of people who can take bribes and subvert leadership under the term "merit".
And, explain how one would calculate "merit"? In my experiences, meritocracies are monocultures that put forth their own biases as "merit".
1: money isn't the only form of bribery.
2: people who want more... will always want more and will never stop taking.
3: there is no good way to tell a person from someone who wants to give to help, and someone who wants to give to get something in return.
A more effective if morally dark methodology is publicly and viscously execute people who take bribes in this system.
If you have a system in place that can find and punish bribes - why not pay them a reasonable amount of money - and just eliminate bribes without spending $0.1T per year...