Congress Gets $4700 Pay Raise

Didn’t Democrats grill the CEO’s of the Big Three over their salaries?  Haven’t the GOP criticized the UAW over their salaries and benefits?

Yet Congress is going to allow itself to receive a cola of $4700 this year, during a harsh economic slump?  Two words. TERM LIMITS!

In the meantime, may I suggest that the American people demand that Congress revoke the law that grants them yearly cost of living adjustments.

A cola makes a joke out of the 27th Amendment, which states:

No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.

If Congress wants a raise, they need to vote on it and face the wrath of the voters, which in this economy, would be considerable.

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.”  Read more….

Mark Twain of Congress wrote, “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”  Amen to that.

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Tags: Congress, pay raise