Congressional pay, and all federal positions, should be a function of the minimum wage. The job pays the minimum wage times some number. If they want a raise, the only way to get it is to raise the minimum wage.
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They really haven’t earned it
Why?
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This is not a bad thing in general. Making the pay higher makes it easier for working class people to rely on the pay (especially since you might need a place in DC and your home state). If you keep the pay low, only the richest people with external sources of income can afford to stay in
Edit: to clarify, it is certainly still frustrating that most of the people who will benifit really don’t need that pay,
I don’t know why the hell people are downvoting this. AOC is quoted in the article talking about why this exact sort of thing is necessary.
- Washington, D.C. has a 50% higher cost of living compared to the rest of the US. Even just for the rent, you’re already down a considerable amount for something that’s strictly extraneous and only done for your job.
- Generally speaking, you’ll maintain a residence in your home district as well. There are plenty of practical reasons for this. Maybe you have a family which doesn’t want to upend their lives to live in DC. Maybe you want to run for re-election, in which case the US Constitution is extremely clear that you must reside in the state at the time you’re elected. Maybe you want to be able to go home when Congress isn’t in session. Maybe you want something to fall back on if you get voted out. This isn’t bourgie; it’s pragmatic and makes your job at least somewhat bearable. This sets you back a fair bit as well.
- As a politician in a national legislature, you should at least ideally have attained higher education (looking at you, Boebert and MTG). There isn’t technically a requirement for this, but most members do, and furthermore, members should be encouraged to be highly educated. That is, you should seek to attract highly qualified candidates, even if the US right now is backsliding on that. The job of a national politician, done right, is extremely tiring, stressful, complicated, high-profile, and thankless, so you want to at least be competitive in a way that doesn’t make taking this job feel like a sacrifice. (Done wrong, of course, and we end up with fascist Republicans and neoliberal dinosaurs pocketing millions. But that’s not a problem of the salaries being ineffective; that’s the result of things like Citizens United, failing to disallow stock trading, defunding public education, etc.)
- If you have a family that lives back home, you’ll have a situation where your spouse is functionally a single parent, and thus costs for childcare etc. will be astronomically higher.
- The job is inherently unstable, thus not giving most members a reliable long-term financial plan unlike what you might have, say, in a highly skilled position at a company.
Money bad. Congress bad. Double bad. Oo.
$164k seems like enough to me.
That’s above the table before all the bribes and pocket lining. 🤑 Yay, money! 🇺🇸 /satire
It’s all about the insider trading for the big bucks.
Until it stays that way forever. By law it’s supposed to adjust every year for inflation, but it hasn’t since 2009 as the inflation adjustment gets shot down every year mostly because of the obvious optics of raising pay
Low pay is a real problem and barrier in local and state government, we shouldn’t want the US congress to add another barrier for people with lower income. There’s already enough barriers already
They can fuck right off. No leader’s pay should automatically adjust for inflation unless everyone else’s does too.
They are nowhere near being paid too little.
