Lamh Foistenach Abu!
Posted on 12/17/2008 7:07:30 PM PST by NormsRevenge
A crumbling economy, more than 2 million constituents who have lost their jobs this year, and congressional demands of CEOs to work for free did not convince lawmakers to freeze their own pay.
Instead, they will get a $4,700 pay increase, amounting to an additional $2.5 million that taxpayers will spend on congressional salaries, and watchdog groups are not happy about it.
“As lawmakers make a big show of forcing auto executives to accept just $1 a year in salary, they are quietly raiding the vault for their own personal gain,” said Daniel O’Connell, chairman of The Senior Citizens League (TSCL), a non-partisan group. “This money would be much better spent helping the millions of seniors who are living below the poverty line and struggling to keep their heat on this winter.”
However, at 2.8 percent, the automatic raise that lawmakers receive is only half as large as the 2009 cost of living adjustment of Social Security recipients.
Still, Steve Ellis, vice president of the budget watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense, said Congress should have taken the rare step of freezing its pay, as lawmakers did in 2000.
“Look at the way the economy is and how most people aren’t counting on a holiday bonus or a pay raise — they’re just happy to have gainful employment,” said Ellis. “But you have the lawmakers who are set up and ready to get their next installment of a pay raise and go happily along their way.”
Member raises are often characterized as examples of wasteful spending, especially when many constituents and businesses in members’ districts are in financial despair.
Rep. Harry Mitchell, a first-term Democrat from Arizona, sponsored legislation earlier this year that would have prevented the automatic pay adjustments from kicking in for members next year. But the bill, which attracted 34 cosponsors, failed to make it out of committee.
“They don’t even go through the front door. They have it set up so that it’s wired so that you actually have to undo the pay raise rather than vote for a pay raise,” Ellis said.
Freezing congressional salaries is hardly a new idea on Capitol Hill.
Lawmakers have floated similar proposals in every year dating back to 1995, and long before that. Though the concept of forgoing a raise has attracted some support from more senior members, it is most popular with freshman lawmakers, who are often most vulnerable.
In 2006, after the Republican-led Senate rejected an increase to the minimum wage, Democrats, who had just come to power in the House with a slew of freshmen, vowed to block their own pay raise until the wage increase was passed. The minimum wage was eventually increased and lawmakers received their automatic pay hike.
In the beginning days of 1789, Congress was paid only $6 a day, which would be about $75 daily by modern standards. But by 1965 members were receiving $30,000 a year, which is the modern equivalent of about $195,000.
Currently the average lawmaker makes $169,300 a year, with leadership making slightly more. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) makes $217,400, while the minority and majority leaders in the House and Senate make $188,100.
Ellis said that while freezing the pay increase would be a step in the right direction, it would be better to have it set up so that members would have to take action, and vote, for a pay raise and deal with the consequences, rather than get one automatically.
“It is probably never going to be politically popular to raise Congress’s salary,” he said. “I don’t think you’re going to find taxpayers saying, ‘Yeah I think I should pay my congressman more’.”
In light of our impending depression, I consider this move to be nothing short of unAmerican and yes...unpatriotic.
Why shouldn’t they? It’s all Bush’s fault, after all!
I think “appropriate” messages are in line for the Christmas season should be sent to these scum, which I will begin doing. I’m not sure what exactly it will take for the American people to be outraged enough to demand some form of justice.
Un-Freakin’-Believable
This is an OUTRAGE! Mail EVERYONE!
What are you going to do? I’d be glad to join in.
Caesar’s double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.
—WH AUDEN, fr. The Fall of Rome
Pitch forks and tar?
What on earth are the little people complaining about now? They took a pay cut, lol.
That’s only the pay raise that the sheeple actually see. I’m sure it’s more than that.
Why should we expect the same crooks that started this economic crisis to get us out of it?
Pray for W, America and Our Troops
Strange...
Not a word as to how this "automatic raise" came about.
Please don't tell me that they voted on their own raise --- forever?
Or to put it a more useful way, how do we, the employers, undo this BS?
I say we freeze their pay (and per diem) until it's more in line with the "middle class."
They’re worth every penny too!
Lamh Foistenach Abu!
In light of our impending depression, I consider this move to be nothing short of unAmerican and yes...unpatriotic.
Now ,Now .. thats not very patriotic of you.
The only group that has done a worse job of decision-making and managing than auto executives is CONGRESS!!!!!!!
I think I’m going to find my congressional rep’s address - real snail-mail address - and simply mail them (senators and congressmen) a simple, blank, pink slip. Think they’ll get the message?
Well ya see - that’s why they need the raise. Not only do they have to run congress, they need to run Fanny Mae, Citicorp, GM, Ford, etc.
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