With economy in shambles, Congress gets a raise

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.

{mosads}“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’.”