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US Congress Gives Itself A Pay Raise
By Ian Cooper on December 21, 2008 | More Posts By Ian Cooper | Author's Website
What great timing Congress has.
Taxpayers are already on the hook for the $700 billion bailout, another $17.4 billion for the automakers, and millions more. So what’s another $2.5 million in Congressional pay raises? Yep, even though we’re buried in debt. Even though millions of Americans have lost their jobs, their homes, their livelihood, Congress voted to give itself a raise.
Each will receive a $4,700 pay raise, which increases salaries to $174,000, as the deficit is on pace to reach a trillion dollar, and as the national debt stands at $10 trillion. Plus, considering the ethically challenged Congress before us, hit with allegations of corruption, they should get nothing.
Here’s more from TheHill.com:
“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’.”
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In spite of the fact that Congress has only a 9% approval rating, they have given themselves a raise. While ordinary Americans are struggling to make ends meet, Congress continues to live the good life. They just don’t get it. Some Republicans tried to block the raise, but they failed.
I cannot believe that in this economic crisis, the people who were voted in to help protect our incomes, have the gall to vote themselves a pay raise. For the last 3 years, I have received a $.35 cost of living raise. God bless them all!
free haircuts,subsidized flight tickets,6 weeks of recess,aides to do their real work.It won’t stop until one of 2 things happen—America refuses to work or get the top 1000 employers in this country to REFUSE to take with-holding out of checks.Stimulate THAT,Mr Congressperson.Every one of you live in la-la land and it’s not a dem/republican thing–it IS malfeasance and dereliction of duty,nothing less
Interesting: Congress gave themselves a raise
BUT did not give a COLA (Cost of Living Raise) to folks on Social Security.
For the people, By the people. The people we have elected seem to have forgotten WHO they are there for. It’s time we took our country back
Well then, let’s recall or vote out of office everyone of them that accepted the pay raise! Then just like the banks and financial institutions, have each member of Congress pay back their pay raise in 09. Their pay raise can be placed into the “kitty” of the unemployment benefits program with re-tro pay for those unemployed as well. And while we are at, this “clean-up” of Washington D.C. politics, why not provide accurate unemployment records and stop “sugar coating” this depression we are in. Like V.P. Biden’s relative stated, more or less, “it is a slow economy when our neighbor has no job, it is a recession when my relative has no job, it is a depression when I lose my job.” Maybe these U.S. Congress person, beginning with Nancy Pelosi, should be unemployed and required to pay back all their earnings since they have held office. After all we voted them in; let’s vote them out! Wake-up America! Let’s clean up Washington D.C. politics! This is our great country not the Democrats nor Republicans country!