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’.”

CMPQwk 1.42-21 9999 
Democrats --  The party of economic destruction ....


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