Source: http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=314496732406937
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, December 18, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Hypocrisy: With workers losing jobs by the millions and taxpayers forced to rescue banks and carmakers, how does Nancy Pelosi's Congress show it cares? By giving themselves a big pay raise.
Read More: General Politics
What a great time for taxpayers to give senators and congressmen a $2.5 million jump in their already bloated salaries. It's tough to get by on $217,400 a year if you're House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — even if, as the Washington Times reported, you funneled nearly $100,000 from your political action committee to your husband's business over a decade.
Last year, Pelosi supported a bill banning payments from PACs to congressional spouses, but that didn't stop her from doing it. Most members of Congress have to subsist on only $169,300 annually, so the $4,700 raise they're giving themselves next year should help keep them off food stamps.
It's hard to know where to start in expressing outrage. The last thing this Congress deserves is a raise. A new report from Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., found over $1 billion in taxpayer funding wasted on nonsense ranging from searching in vain for Alaskan ice worms to an airplane-shaped, nonworking gas station in Tennessee to nearly $300,000 for specialty potatoes for high-end restaurants.
Then there's the tone-deaf lack of empathy for working Americans lucky even to have a job, let alone get a raise.
Finally, there's the hypocritical insistence that people outside government who actually do productive work, like those running businesses, don't make too much. "We sent a message to Wall Street: The party is over," Pelosi crowed as Congress insisted on restrictions on executive pay in October.
Two years ago a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., called it "unconscionable that members of Congress would get yet another pay raise while the minimum wage has been stuck at $5.15 an hour for the last 10 years," and so Democrats supported tying congressional pay to a hike in the minimum wage.
So people getting paid too little means Congress shouldn't be paid more, but people not getting paid at all via massive layoffs makes a congressional pay raise OK?
Democratic lawmakers have dragged CEOs of oil companies, carmakers and banks to Washington and blowtorched them on TV about their pay, stock options and severance deals. They pushed CEOs to make symbolic gestures like working for a buck a year.
Yet Congress itself won't take part in the sacrifice. Our representatives may succeed in raising their pay, but the price will be taxpayers raising hell.
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