What's Fair: CUT ALL CONGRESS SALARIES BY 25% IN 2012

What's Fair:
CUT ALL CONGRESS SALARIES BY 25% IN 2012
CUT THEIR PENSION BY 50%

Dramatic? Hardly. As U.S. workers have suffered layoffs, pay cuts, benefit contribution increases, insurance rates skyrocketing, and union busting over the past two years, While Congress has actually been spending more money than ever!!

In fact, if it hadn’t been for a bill that Kirkpatrick supported, Kirkpatrick and her colleagues in the U.S. legislature would have gotten automatic pay raises, as they did in 2008 and 2009.

Yes, U.S. Rep. Kirkpatrick (D, AZ) actually sponsored legislation that would cut congressional salaries a modest 5%, saying it was high time that Congress shared the pain with the rest of America, as did Gabby Giffords.

The House voted to cut the office budgets for members of Congress by 5 percent, said Giffords. I strongly support that cut. But our salaries should not be exempt. Members of Congress must set an example and there’s no better way to do that than by cutting our own salaries. Office budget cut of 5% is a joke too.
Sorry, Gabby, just calling a spade a spade. Legistorm, based on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, has been around since September 2006 has been dedicated to providing a variety of important information about the US Congress. LegiStorm's first information product was a database of congressional staff salaries but have now added other valuable information, such as the most comprehensive database of all privately financed trips taken by members of Congress and congressional staffers. The information is provided in a strictly factual, non-partisan fashion.

Cutting salaries of members of Congress is supported by numerous taxpayer groups, like Americans for Tax Reform, Citizens Against Government Waste and the National Taxpayers Union. Could this be a true conservatism, the true conservatism that makes sense, and nearly everyone can get behind?

In a Wisconsin Town Hall Meeting Representative Sean Duffy (WI-07)Complains about his $170,000 Congressional Salary: "I Struggle" complaining about that $174,000 Congressional salary to constituents at a townhall meeting in Amery, Wisconsin, a salary that is nearly four and a half times more than the average Wisconsin FAMILY earns annually in his district. Representative Duffy told a constituent who identified as an out -of-work builder and bus driver, "I’m not living high off the hog."
FACT: Even when Representative Duffy was a District Attorney, he consistently made more than double what working Wisconsin families earn. He claims he didn't take a salary for seven months during his campaign, yet he took a taxpayer funded salary as District Attorney for the majority of campaign for Congress, for nearly a year. Representative Duffy received a salary of more than $90,000 in 2009. In 2010, for the seven months he was campaigning without a taxpayer-funded salary, Duffy reimbursed himself over ten thousand dollars for everything from mileage to miscellaneous expenses. Awww... Don'tcha feel so sorry for the poor guy?

Constituent: I’m a builder. I haven’t been building too many things in the last couple years with the economy down. My wife is a teacher. I’m fortunate enough to take a bus driving job. Love it. Just love it. But it’s not very much money of course. It’s working for us. I’m just wondering, what are Congressman’s, Senator’s wages? My wife is going to have to take a cut if this bill goes through and I’m just wondering what your wage is and if you guys would be willing to take a cut?

Duffy: So the question is, what is my wage? And I’ll answer your question and I’ll get to it in one second. I was the Ashland County DA and uh I decided to run for Congress. And as this race heated up in the first part of June, I resigned as the Ashland County DA because I didn’t want to campaign on your tax dollars and so I didn’t and I resigned. I have 6 children and I’ve gone for roughly 7 months with 6 kids and no paycheck. It was worth it for me to do that because I believe in what I was doing. I get the Congressional salary is 174 thousand dollars. I didn’t vote on that . I got there on January 5th. I came into it without a play in it.

Constituent: "But a hundred and seventy-four thousand, that’s three times... that’s three of my family’s...three times what I make."

Duffy: Well our budget, I moved to cut by 5 percent. I did. You know what, I have no problem..let’s have a movement afoot. I walked into this job 6 weeks ago..um that I worked incredibly hard for. And I can guarantee you or most of you, I guarantee that I have more debt than all of you. With 6 kids, I still pay off my student loans. I still pay my mortgage. I drive a used minivan. If you think I’m living high off the hog, I’ve got one paycheck. So I..I struggle to meet my bills right now. Would it be easier for me if I get more paychecks? Maybe, but at this point I’m not living high off the hog.

Interesting to note that Representative Duffy, a fairly young man who holds degrees in both Marketing and Law, is a former participant of MTV's "The Real World", Road Rules: All Stars in 1998, (where he met his wife Rachel). Then at age 29 appeared on Real World/Road Rules Challenge: Battle of the Seasons, which aired in 2002. Both he and his wife appeared in a filmed segment on 2008's The Real World Awards Bash, while Duffy served as district attorney.

He is clearly just getting started in Washington D.C., and he'll likely fit right into the bizarre reality of the GOP sideshow.

So you might have noticed by now... our congress as it stands does not represent their constituencies. Oh, sure, they try to bring home pet pork projects to make it look like they are doing something, but the average Congressman has over 700,000 constituents. Is he likely to even meet a fraction of them face-to-face? How much does he actually care about their interests anyway? The likeliest outcome in districts of this size is for Representatives to focus their efforts on organized interest groups who lobby him and donate the most to his campaigns. With Citizens' United, a huge blow to the voice of American People, it's a corporatocracy, and tax dollars is funding it.

The notion of cutting Congressional pay is wildly popular. A recent survey by the Rasmussen Reports found that 75% of Americans think members of Congress should cut their pay until the budget is balanced. And nearly one in eight think members of Congress should not be able to get a raise unless taxpayers vote for it.

But in order to get legislation passed, you must first get it heard in committee. Then the bill is brought to the floor of the House for a vote. Then, of course, it will be known who voted against it, and if it's brought for a vote in an election year, it's a bit difficult to squirm out of doing the right thing. Follow?

So when congress doesn't want to present something so politically unpopular, it is simply not scheduled for a hearing, and it never gets voted on. The term of art for this process is called letting a bill die in committee. The dead bill languishes in the halls of congress like a bad odor.

Giving themselves generous raises generates public ire, so legislators passed a bill to make annual pay hikes for Congress automatic. Nice, huh? This requires members to vote against getting a raise. Otherwise, the increase takes effect automatically. It was signed in May 2010 by President Barack Obama and was the second consecutive year lawmakers opted not to receive their automatic cost-of-living increase. This nixed Congress' automatic 2011 pay raise.

The base pay for House and Senate lawmakers is $174,000, though leaders earn a higher salary. Another cost-of-living increase would have given lawmakers a $1,600 raise in 2011. By rescinding the increase, lawmakers saved taxpayers $850,000 for next year.

Reps. Harry Mitchell (D-Ariz.) and Jim Matheson’s (D-Utah) bill, while Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) led the charge to halt the pay increase in the upper chamber.
"To raise congressional pay at a time when so many families are still struggling to make ends meet would be unconscionable and glaringly out of touch", said Mitchell.

With passage of the Ethics Reform Act of 1989, lawmakers authorized themselves the automatic, "no debate, no vote" annual cost-of-living raise, unless they specifically pass legislation rejecting or reducing it. Congress has voted to reject the automatic raise six times since then, most recently in 2007. In 2008, lawmakers accepted a $4,100 raise.

Members of Congress set their own pay and they’ve been quite generous. Rank and file members of congress now earn $174,000 annually — more than about 97% of the rest of the country. That’s up 23% over the past decade. Cutting Congressional pay would still be generous!

In addition to their $174,000 annual salaries ($193,400 for House and Senate leadership), all members of Congress have discretionary office accounts worth roughly $1.5 million and travel at the public’s expense. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.Congressional perks, though scaled back bit over the past decade, are still generous enough to make you drool.

If Kirkpatrick’s legislation passed, it would have been the first Congressional pay CUT in 77 years since the Great Depression.

So what happened to cutting Congressional pay? Nothing. Because "Congress" happened, of course. Members of Congress did what they always do when there is a popular bill that they want to kill. They ignore it, thus allowing a bill to die quietly of neglect so that no elected leader faces the unpleasantness of telling the American people with actions (which speak louder than than words): "We don’t feel your pain and we don’t have to."