how typical...

[acroyear]

House members seek pay raise of $4,400 - Yahoo! News:

Despite low approval ratings and hard feelings from last year's elections, Democrats and Republicans in the House are reaching out for an approximately $4,400 pay raise that would increase their salaries to almost $170,000.

Some people really shouldn't be put in charge of their own salaries, you know?

Comments

[javasaurus.livejournal.com]

The Congress normally gets a cost-of-living increase each year, based on inflation. The $4400 increase is a raise of about 2.65%, which is in line with current inflation rates.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

and higher than anybody earning minimum wage has gotten in over 12 years.

oh, ok, nevermind. they are getting that higher up.

on the other hand, are congressmen really that broke that they NEED another 4K a year?

[javasaurus.livejournal.com]

I don't really understand why minimum wage has not been tied to inflation. But there's a lot going on financially in our country's government which really doesn't make sense. Just think if all the money spent on military operations in Iraq was spent on health care, scientific research, funding education, or simply not spending it at all! (also, how would oil prices be affected if we had not gone into Iraq?)

Here's a nice tidbit: even though Bush's salary doesn't go up annually, he makes 400,000 per year, twice what Clinton made.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

nobody ties ANYTHING to a variable standard if they can help it.

consider the AMT (fixed dollar amount) or the estate "death" tax (fixed dollar amount).

if its a fixed dollar amount, congress feels they are still in control of it. otherwise, it turns into something that is attached to executive branch to assign an overseer out of one of its finance departments and that may be giving too much "power" to the executive to effectively make law.

nevermind that its actually an appropriate as the executor of the law to make such a determination in the first place...

[museclio]

There is also the technicality that they are doing it for the next term, not their own current term.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

actually, the other reason why min-wage isn't attached to inflation? it can cause a spiral - inflation *sometimes* is attached to increasing labor costs (not recently, where the gas instability and weather has been more troublesome).

thus, if inflation goes up because of labor costs, and that causes the min wage to go up, that causes inflation, which causes min wage increases and the spiral can be devastating. its exactly the wage-price spiral that really hit the 70s hard, even more than the gas prices, and is why "Reaganomics" came into existence: stop the spiral by over-supporting the top.

didn't work, of course.