The whole concept of automatic pay raises should be revoked so that every time Congress thinks they deserve a pay raise, they would be required to bring the issue to the floor for discussion and vote. It should be part of the transparent government Obama has been advocating. In fact, in good conscience given our collective economic insecurity, Congress should vote themselves a pay decrease. While on its face this seems radical, it is not unprecedented. During the Great Depression, Congress did just that. In 1925, members of Congress received a yearly salary of $10,000. By 1932 that salary had been reduced by 10 percent to $9,000, and was further cut to $8,500 in 1933. Gradually, the scale was reversed so that by 1935, Congressional pay was back up to a yearly $10,000. Based on Consumer Price Index calculations, $10,000 in 1925 would be worth $118,280 in 2007, or based on a Gross Domestic Product index, it would be worth $99,210. To put this in perspective, the average salary for a member of Congress in 2008 was $169,300 while the average median salary for workers across seven different sectors was $58,613.
This is not to suggest that the members of Congress shouldn’t be paid or that they are overpaid, but they are paid more than their counterparts during the Depression and more than most Americans today. Most representatives work hard and care both about their country and their jobs. But so do most Americans and many of them need to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet (if they are lucky enough to have even one job). And while it’s true that most members of Congress, regardless of their political persuasion, didn’t choose to serve in government to become wealthy, most are more in love with their power and status than with the compensation package, which is irrelevant to most of their lives. The legislative process that allows them to shield their own pay raises from more frequent public scrutiny exemplifies the hubris of that kind of power.
Granted, a bill that decreased Congressional pay would not be wildly popular in the halls of Congress, but it would be a positive step that might go a long way in reversing their poll numbers. It also could start eliminating the double standard. Congress was quite willing to publicly excoriate the auto workers and their managers about their compensation, requiring some cuts in exchange for the federal loans and smiling for the cameras when some CEOs suggested that they would take only $1 in pay this year. The thinking was that these workers and their managers ran their companies into the ground and didn’t deserve much in the way of compensation.
Congress, as the body in charge of appropriations and spending, has much of the responsibility for driving our economy into the ground. Surely they are not alone in this mess, but the lack of pushback for spending on an unpopular war, lack of oversight of just about every federal agency, the lack of prosecution and investigation of the SEC and of banking practices when the alarms were going off – all can and should be laid at the feet of Congress. Yes, we’ve had a president who thinks he’s the unitary executive and is above the law, but we also had a Congress that rarely challenged that premise. Even when they did make an effort, they failed. More often than not, they simply folded the deck and went home instead of standing up for the rule of law. They lost both the war and the battle in their limp and limited efforts to contain a bully president. Surely this counts as poor management, too.
While a small pay cut would not change the lifestyle of anyone in Congress and would hardly make a dent in injecting some needed cash into the federal coffers, it would go a long way toward restoring the faith of the electorate.
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