Lawmakers could get as high as a $6,600 pay raise as part of a short-term government funding bill that's set to get a vote this week.
  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
    61·
    1 year ago

    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.