Good Jobs At Good Wages
With a pay hike for the pols who helped bollix your economy. Barney Frank admits a twinge of guilt. About the raise, not helping to bollix your economy, that is. Boston Herald:
As Bay State residents grapple with layoffs and salary cuts, Massachusetts’ 12-member congressional delegation is digging into a whopping $4,700 salary boost that went into effect Thursday.
Six of the 12 delegation members told the Herald they’d accepted the automatic increase, which will hike their pay to $174,000, a roughly 2.8 percent raise, when Congress convenes Tuesday.
The other six did not respond to repeated inquiries by phone over the past week, but none has announced any plan to forgo the hike.
“Right now the vast majority of the public is just happy to have a job,” said Steve Ellis, vice president of fiscal watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense. “One of the first actions Congress should take is show some shared sacrifice and put off a pay raise until the unemployment numbers are better.”
U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Newton) admitted to feeling guilty about the raise at a time when many Massachusetts residents are struggling to make ends meet.
“In the current situation we’re in we shouldn’t be doing this. We should vote not to do one next year,” said Frank. He said he plans to put forward a resolution this year to block the 2010 raise but declined to offer details.
…
Nearly 20 years ago, Congress made an annual cost-of-living pay increase automatic unless lawmakers voted to do otherwise.
Thereby enabling the Congressional shrug.
Frank joined two other legislators who told the Herald they would give their pay hike to charity. Both Sen. John F. Kerry and Rep. Niki Tsongas (D-Lowell) said they will donate their increases, and Tsongas said she’d vote against the hike.
“It is unclear whether the House will have the opportunity to vote to suspend this year’s scheduled increase; however, during these very challenging economic times, I will vote against a pay increase given the opportunity,” Tsongas said in a statement.
And there’s the shrug. Memo to sleazy auto execs, dirtball financiers, etc. Next time some hack grills you about how you got to his show trial, ask whether they’ve voted on the pay hike yet. Nothing accusatory, you guys are hardly in a position to squawk. just in an offhand way, professional chitchat kind of way. It will make fun political theater.
“If the scheduled increase does go through, I will not take it, and I plan to donate the pay raise to a scholarship fund administered by the Greater Lowell Community Foundation.”
While the gesture is noble, the charity donation still boosts lawmakers’ pensions in the long run and ensures further percentage-based raises are calculated on the higher salary, said Ellis.
“It’s a win-win-win,” said Ellis. “They get a tax benefit, they get a public relations boost for giving money to charity and they still get the benefit to their pension.”
Related, not so different, Michael R. Crittenden* at WSJ, The Bailout Bowl: Big-Game Sponsors Scored Billions. It’s all about the companies that you are subsidizing, none of which are involved in direct consumer services, shelling out for purposes of prestige.
“There’s interestingly zero sense of shame” from banks paying for vanity advertising, said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform.
* No relation, but on the basis of this article, I’m an admirer.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:23 pm Comments (1) on Sunday, January 4, 2009
One Response to “Good Jobs At Good Wages”
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January 4th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
The WSJ article appears to neglect the probability that the contracts to make these expenditures were signed long ago, and cannot be revoked without penalty. Moreover, advertising and marketing are necessary expenses for any large corporation that intends to make money by serving a mass market audience. The article was not so much investigative journalism as it was just carping.