[Infowarrior] - Congressional Hypocracy

[Richard Forno]

Funny how they never vote on an across-the-board pay raise for us.   
I'd like an extra $4700 for my salary, please.  And in this economy?   
Talk about chutzpah.  Unbelievable.  --rf

Disclosure: I used to work for the US House in the mid-90s.


With economy in shambles, Congress gets a raise
By Jordy Yager
Posted: 12/17/08 05:41 PM [ET]

http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/with-economy-in-shambles-congress-gets-a-raise-2008-12-17.html

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’.”