So, a fair headline might be: “House Democrats nix Senate GOP plan to raise their own salaries.”
A bipartisan group of lawmakers reportedly supported the measure in order to encourage average and middle class Americans to run for office.
Most members of Congress currently make $174,000 a year.
Yeah. Given that’s far greater than average salary, I’m thinking that middle-class Americans aren’t nixing thoughts of a congressional run because it doesn’t pay enough.
Now, if they want to pass a bill that gets rid of all the brown nosing and posturing that needs to be done to get elected or the way you need to sell yourself to corporate interests to get contributions, that might help.
During a private meeting on Monday evening, Democrats decided to nix a section of the funding bill that Congress is set to vote on this week that included a raise for members of Congress and staff.
The staff seriously need a raise, especially the unpaid interns.
In D.C. that’s borderline poverty. Really.
I guess the Rethugliklans won’t be getting their merit pay. Sad.
OT, but another bigly win for Donnie!
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald Trump has reached a groundbreaking deal with the Hawaiian Islands to make them the nation’s fiftieth state, Trump confirmed on Monday.
Calling it “my most incredible deal yet,” Trump said that he had forced Hawaii to bend to his will and “cough up billions” to become a state.
“This is a big win for our country,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “Hawaii is going to be a beautiful and amazing state.”
Just minutes after his announcement, however, there was significant pushback from Hawaii, which claimed that it had already reached a deal to become a state in 1959.
That claim swiftly drew the ire of Trump, who denounced Hawaii’s alleged sixty years of statehood as “fake news” and “disgraceful.”
“The Hawaiians better be very, very careful what they say,” Trump warned. “I made them a state and I can take that away.”
I have to say, in my meager living situation, if I did have the Speaker’s accumulated wealth, I would either forego my pay as a member of the House, or distribute it amongst my staff and/or charities in my district.
Simple solution.
Raise staff pay, pay interns, and put the Federal Minimum Wage and Congressional pay on a COLA.
Who could possibly disagree with that?
I propose we triple the base salary of unpaid interns!
Seriously, though — voting a pay raise for oneself is never going to have good optics. This would be far less contentious if we had a funding proposal that targeted congressional staff and interns only, explicitly excluded all elected MOCs, and maybe after that we could start to take a look at relieving some of the structural inequitites in pay and wealth across the board in this country.
Also, average middle class Americans aren’t being enticed (or dissuaded) from public service by the meagre pay. They are dissuaded by the idea of having to work with the McConnells, Gaetzs, Goehmerts, and other professional bastard-class politicians for a living – and still not being able to have an impact.
Not really. Fed pay overall is anemic when doing the one-for-one comparisons for like positions.
There’s a reason that the FAA has outsourced most of the technical expertise to Boeing engineers-- the FAA can’t pay enough for qualified people to be competitive with the private sector.
I wonder whether it would be better, instead of raising pay, to offer housing and other allowances, somewhat along the lines of military base housing (but not). It would probably be cheaper in the long run to build a bunch of houses or apartments of suitable scale for congresspeople, and to avoid the situation where they’re beholden to others for their living arrangements. Ditto for travel to and from their districts. (Or maybe buy the residences of departing legislators and other officials – idunno)
They should give staffers a raise.
Sadly, many of these politicians are independently wealthy - so a raise won’t matter much to them.
However, federal employee salaries are capped (except for Cabinet members and a few other key positions) because they are not allowed to earn as much as a member of Congress.
That’s one of the reasons why the VA is having trouble hiring doctors and other agencies are having trouble attracting top scientific and cyber-security talent - they can’t compete with the pay and benefits offered by the private sector without a lengthy and difficult pay-exemption process.
Law of unintended consequences… Decade of no raise for Congress means that more and more people are getting close to or hitting the limits.
Seems to me if you want fewer people for whom the salary is meaningless in light of their personal wealth in Congress, you need to raise the salaries to make it at least enticing for someone who is civic minded and perhaps very skilled to consider it.
Of course the optics are always bad, but I’d rather see folks for whom a $200k salary makes it worth their while to run actually representing us instead of energy executives and hedge fund investors.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers reportedly supported the measure in order to encourage average and middle class Americans to run for office.
Uh huh. This is BS. The $174K is way more than the “average” in this country.
ETA: @paulw That’s an excellent idea.
It’s also one of the most expensive places to live.
Maintaining a home in your home state and trying to rent something in D.C., that salary doesn’t cut it.
Would agree that something like a housing allowance/ per diem or actually providing housing would be totally acceptable alternatives (and believe they already get reimbursement for a lot of their travel to and from their state, so that’s less of an issue).
But also keep in mind the other bits-- like Fed worker salaries capped below them. Maybe time to revisit and remove those caps.
I’m okay with Reps. and Senators forgoing raises for a couple years, but they should reconsider staff raises - government workers, including Congressional staff, are generally underpaid as it is
Not just any COLA, though - the same COLA they use for Social Security. The best way to ensure Congress doesn’t shaft beneficiiaries of social programs is to tie their own salary increases to the same rate.