A different kind of wage cut

September 27, 2005

I’m very much opposed to the suspension of Davis-Bacon Act, which led to a Gulf Coast Wage Cut. But if, in the aftermath of two massive hurricanes, Congress is willing to take a pay cut, it’s an idea I can get behind.

Amid the debate over how to fund the hurricane recovery effort along the Gulf Coast, a few lawmakers are suggesting that they forgo their pay raises for a few years.

Fiscal conservatives in both the House and Senate have included a pay freeze as part of proposals in response to a federal deficit expected to reach about $330 billion this year and then heading skyward as the costs of rebuilding after hurricanes Katrina and Rita come in.

“Average Americans in all 50 states are reaching into their pocketbooks and investing in relief and recovery efforts,” said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., a leader of House conservatives. “The power and symbol of members of Congress doing that, regardless of the size of the contribution, could be very important.”

That’s the first thing Pence has said that makes sense in quite a while. Granted, Pence wants to cut tens of billions from health care programs for seniors and families in poverty, and the savings of a pay freeze for lawmakers is only $14 million, so this does little to change the lunacy behind Pence’s broader “Operation Offset.” That said, symbolically, seeing Congress sacrifice a little wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

In fact, I wouldn’t mind seeing Dems take the lead on something like this. Last week, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi announced she’d be willing to forgo her highway bill earmarks to help pay for Katrina, while her GOP counterpart, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, rejected the idea. It made Dems look responsible and charitable, while leaving Republicans greedy and almost mean-spirited.

Why not do the same thing here? After all, in June, it was a House Dem who led the resistance against a measure to give Congress another pay raise. While Rep. Jim Matheson (D-Utah) was railing against the 1.9% COLA, Tom DeLay was doing the opposite.

“It’s not a pay raise,” said House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas. “It’s an adjustment so that they’re not losing their purchasing power.”

It fits into the broader message of Republicans putting their self-interest over the public good, doesn’t it?

Ever since I’ve been involved in electoral politics, it has been clear that republicans are interested in making money for themselves. They see elective office as an opportunity to gain personal wealth. So I don’t expect republicans to sacrifice a portion of their pay “adjustment” or their pork.

  • It’s very easy to pay for all this stuff. We can save $200 billion right there by getting the fuck out of Iraq. Now.

    There’s your “Operation Offset”. Sorry, we just can’t afford any more of these expensive resource wars. See ya.

    Still not enough “offset”? No problem– tax the rich.

    I’m disgusted that Democrats just completely fumbled this one, were too wimpy and lame, and let the Repugs seize the PR initiative here. Idiots. The second people in the gulf started suffering, Democratic leadership should have been running around the Hill with aggressive, sweeping proposals to actively and proudly RAISE taxes on the rich to pay for extra reconstruction. Go to it! Grab the moral high ground! But what did we get? A wimpy and polite request to stall the Paris Hilton Tax Cut (which seems to have worked… for now), and a few reasonable, fatalistic, compromise-oriented proposals to roll back the massive 2001 tax cuts to corporations and the ultra-wealthy– which have gone nowhere.

    Offset this you plutocratic robber barons: raise the maximum tax rate to 90%, like it was in the 1960’s. That’ll flatten out CEO, movie star, rock star, and sports star salaries and bonus packages in a hurry.

  • The salaries of members of Congress have always been a ripe issue for a certain sort of silly demagoguery. At the Constitutional Convention, there was actually a debate over whether the Congress critters should be paid at all, and the issue was only settled after Benjamin Franklin made a very subtle but farcical speech “in favor” of not paying them. Franklin, of course, knew that the practice of not paying Members of Parliament was one of the reliably reactionary features of the British “consitution” best abandoned.

    The Congress has made its own salaries a ceiling for the bureaucracy’s executive level, which has served to emphasize the problem posed by continually holding down the salary level for “symbolic” reasons. At a time when corporate America has inflated executive compensation into the millions, the heads of vast agencies are still compensated in the low six figures. Professional and technical leadership at Federal agencies is similarly capped in all but a very few cases; drug companies are paying many times what the FDA can; even Universities and non-profit research foundations can outpay the National Institutes of Health, which, until recently, was being not very subtly corrupted by “consulting fees” paid by drug companies.

    Even the salary of the President of the United States has been dwarfed over the course of the 20th century by the compensation routinely earned in private business. George Washington earned $50,000 a year, an impressively enormous sum at the time (out of which he was expected to pay his own expenses, however; Revolutionary War experience had shown George’s expenses could be pretty impressively enormous.)

    Today’s Republican Party is all about political symbolism. On every issue, except the transfer of risk to the poor and the middle class, and the transfer of income to very rich, Republicans take only symbolic positions, where there are no costs and benefits to be weighed, no policy consequences to be subtly analyzed. It is a sickness with them, and their principal constituents: the alliance of the greedy with the stupid, which makes up the Republican Party.

    Holding down Congressional salaries by a few percent, while winking at Scottish golf trips, and ignoring the festering problems of executive and professional leadership in the Federal executive, is just the same as “rescuing” Terry Schiavo or advocating a flag-burning amendment. It is a refuge for scoundrels.

    Please do not encourage them.

  • Following Pelosi’s offer, I think an open letter to those few individuals in Alaska in whose name those silly bridges’ budgets were attached to the energy bill, asking them if they would be willing to forgo the pork spending on those projects in order to help with the Katrina rebuilding, is in order. I’m pretty sure the answer would be a resounding “yes.” Of course, the general contractor(s) of the projects would be screaming, very loudly, “NO!”

    The politicians that are saying “no” to giving back their pork emedded in the energy bill are, very likely, not speaking on behalf of their constituents, but on behalf of the corporations that will benefit from “building” the projects, at their constituents’ expense, vis-a-vis tax dollars.

    It would be interesting if some sort of campaign could be developed that went after the voice of the constituents who allegedly are the beneficiaries of these pork projects. Congresspersons would be hard pressed to claim their constituents demand they retain the pork projects when faced with local voices stating the opposite.

    Thoughts?

  • Referring back to goatchowder’s post (2), it strikes me that we Dems have forgotten/abandoned the most basic principal of negotiatiing (and let’s be honest, in its most basic form all politics is negotiation – be it in the cloakrooms, on the floors of Congress, or in the arena of public debate).

    Always ask for more than you expect to get.

    Don’t volunteer to cancel highway projects in “my district” – submit legislation to roll back the entire Highways Bill just passed.

    Don’t offer that “I will decline any salary increase next year” – submit legislation to roll back all government salaries over $100K by 15% next year.

    Don’t offer to postpone making the tax cuts for the wealthy permanent – submit legislation to roll those tax rates back to the pre-Bush levels.

    Right now we are dying the slow death of low expectations. We ask for little and receive less.

    The American people need to be awakened. Put the spurs to them. Deep in our American heart of hearts most of us put the long term good of the country as a whole above the short term gains we might realize as individuals.

    We just need to remind people of what made this country great.

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