[DasherSmasher]

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

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

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’.”

[Steven Ricards]

They should be paid nothing. In my opinion congress and senate should be a honored civil service position that is a volunteer tour of duty. You want to end corruption, take away the abilitly to receive gifts and paid endorsements. You might find many of our senators and congressman looking for something else. More wishfull thinking.

[les_stockton]

We're the ones that elect them. When they do this, check their voting record and then vote accordingly in the next election. Case solved.

[Steven Ricards]

In most cases i dont believe we elect corrupt people. The office corrupts them.

[les_stockton]

From what I have seen, most of the people that get into politics are those same people you knew in high school (and college) (they're a universal constant) that were popular and were always touted as being so smart and so cool, but that you knew they weren't as smart or as cool as everyone thought they were.
These are people that are neither smart nor all that more honest than the rest of us, and the fact is that in some cases, they're not as smart as most of us and they're not as honest either.

What they are that most of us are not (and they were this in school too) is ambitious and very socially gifted.

Look at who wins elections from either party. This is a constant. They're not that good. They're not that honest. They are ambitious and they have better social skills than most of us.

So when we elect them and they don't do what we want, we're stupid if we keep re-electing them, but we do so because we're emotionally attached to an idea. The problem is, if you think like a grown up, you can separate the idea from the person and realize that just because the person turned out to be a dud, doesn't mean that the idea was wrong. Elect someone else and hope that the next person shares the idea.