A couple of days ago I wrote a post about some Dem that thinks our poor underpaid Congress people need a raise…….these people just get more pathetic by the election….but there is an idea that is being floated about the Congress pay raise…….
You were probably outraged when Rep. Jim Moran said members of Congress can’t live on $174,000 per year, right? But over at Salon, Alex Pareene makes the case for why we actually should pay lawmakers more—say, a million bucks a year. Yes, we all hate Congress, but here’s the truth: “A Congress that is made up of rich-but-not-super-rich people is going to be more corruptible than a Congress of really rich people,” Pareene writes. That’s because many lawmakers want to be ultra-rich, which is how we end up with scandals like Bob McDonnell accepting illegal gifts while he was governor of Virginia.
That craving to be mega-rich is also why members of Congress “advance the interests of their funders far more often than they advance the interests of regular folk,” Pareene writes. To remove the influence of the rich on government, “we ought to try to free our lawmakers from reliance on wealthier benefactors.” And higher salaries would be a sort of campaign finance reform: “Everyone loves it when a billionaire candidate like Michael Bloomberg promises to be ‘above politics’ because he can fund his own election, so why not let members of Congress do the same?” Click for Pareene’s full column.
So sorry but most of these toads are already rich and if they cannot live on what we pay then stay home and bother the wife……or like I said the other day….get a second job….but one that does not conflicyt with his government position….try fry cook and see what the rest of us go through.
I suspect too that all we would be doing is allowing them to raise the bar on their greed. For some people, enough is never enough
I still say they need a dormitory complex with cafeteria and so on…….I mean Reid lives at the Ritz Carlton…….they do not need separate living quarters….they only work about 4 months a year….and that may help them to learn to live with each other……
I think Reid is one of those millionaires in his own right, though I would wonder how much of it he made being a Senator
Also, the author doesn’t take into account the lifetime benefits these congress critters get that the average American never sees
Exactly….personally I think they are overpaid for the amount of work they get done……I say take away the gym, the barber shop, the franking, etc part time employees get no benefits…just like in the real world….
They are all failures in my book. Is it time to shut down K Street? We need to get rid of the lobbists.
Amen!