No Wonder They Want To Stay In Office
Dear Editor,
With the fight going on over the speaker position, I got kind of curious about who is being paid what for what they do in the House and what I found was, to say the least, amazing.
As of December 2014, the annual salary of each representative is $174,000, the same as it is for each member of the Senate. The speaker of the House and the majority and minority leaders earn more: $223,500 for the speaker and $193,400 for their party leaders (the same as Senate leaders).
House members are eligible for a member’s representational allowance (MRA) to support them in their official and representational duties to their district. The MRA is calculated based on three components: one for personnel, one for official office expenses and one for official or franked mail. The personal allowance is the same for all members; the office and mail allowances vary based on the members’ district’s distance from Washington, D.C., the cost of office space in the member’s district, and the number of non-business addresses in their district. These three components are used to calculate a single MRA that can fund any expense – even though each component is calculated individually, the franking allowance can be used to pay for personnel expenses if the member so chooses. In 2011 this allowance averaged $1.4 million per member and ranged from $1.35 to $1.67 million.
Franking: to print a mark on a stamp so that the stamp cannot be used again, or to print a mark on an envelope to show that the cost of sending it has been paid. Last time I checked, email doesn’t require a stamp.
The personnel allowance was $944,671 per member in 2010. Each member may employ no more than 18 permanent employees. The salary for employees of members salary is capped at $168,411 as of 2009. I’m still looking into whether those numbers have gone up.
These are your tax dollars at work and is probably a strong reason why these “professional politicians” work so hard to stay in office. Who wouldn’t want a job where you really don’t do squat and make all that money. And try looking up their retirement options. They become eligible to receive benefits after five years of service (two and one-half terms in the House). By comparison a G.I. has to serve 20 years minimum and gets only 50 percent of their base pay.
Think about it you peasants.
Carpe diem.
Alan Marshall
Good article and it proves we are fools to keep electing the same old same old. Look at the US today…. quickly becoming another sh-t hole with the current bunch of socialist now in charge in DC.
Thanks Jv
Always enjoy Marshall’s study and comments.
Thank you Ronny
Thanks. Interesting.
Reminds me of candidate Trump saying so many times that all the best people want to work for him and he hires only the best. As President, he gave TV show Apprentice failed contestant Omarosa a $180,000 job in the White House funded by your tax dollars. I recall a great article by someone spending a day or tow with her. The title of the article was something like “No one knows what Omarosa does, including Omarosa.”
Alan learns to use google yet completely misses the point. Salary is irrelevant to most members of congress who leverage their political influence for personal financial gains. Some it is just as simple as a book deal, others it is inside information for investment advice. For others it is plush business deals for spouses, etc…
The real issue isn’t salary or office budget allowances. It is the ability of big business and wealthy individuals to buy political influence. The real solution isn’t term limits or election reforms. Private money needs to be eliminated entirely from our political system. Until then our political system is just a game for the wealthy to play. You and I are just pawns in their game.
Disce verum
Somebody has just found an English/Latin translator on the web, and now thinks he’s erudite and scholarly !
LOL!
What else did you get for Christmas, Chrissy ?
Thank you austin.
They say emulating someone is a way of showing your admiration of them so, Thanks PG Chris
wiki-wiki. maui no ka oi.
I took four years of Latin in school and actually remeber a good deal. We had a lot of silly slogans. Nerds gotta nerd. But Alan and you are just grumpy old men with very narrow minded views.
I took FIVE years of Latin at Leeds Grammar School.
Vis Latine locqui?
And i’m not old (50’s), not grumpy (I even get bank tellers chuckling), and not at all narrow minded. It’s amazing that you feel qualified to slander me when you know nothing about me.
“It ain’t what people don’t know that gets ’em in trouble. It’s what they know for sure that just ain’t so” – Will Rogers. You “know” a lot that just ain’t so, Chris.
Chris I agree with you about the private money and we should add lobbyists to that list but I disagree about term limits. Service to the country and people should be a privilege and an honor not a job with all the lifetime perks and benefits that OUR elected officials receive from the peoples tax dollars. They seem to have forgotten they work for us. We need to rewind the clock on this all the way back to when President Truman left office and drove himself and Bess back home in his own car and left the perks of office behind in DC along with the secret service.
pretty close Chris…
Thanks for the research Alan Marshall. I saw on tv other day that retiring Nancy Pelosi before leaving got a pay raise for aides to over $200,000 a year telling us they need a raise so they can continue to get the best qualified people. Oh yeah they still vote their own pay raises. One of the many things wrong with Washington.
Yeah, don’t you love it Rod when, in an example of government greed, they pay themselves much more than appropriate “to get the best people”. But most employees in the Parasitic Sector are marginally incompetent and/or grossly lazy. They know they won’t get fired.
But Leftists think that if they pay monkeys more money, the monkeys will suddenly become “the best people”!
The truth is that we just get stuck with overpaid monkeys.
—– And that’s “The Public Sector” in a nutshell.
Thanks Rod
All the time comes from now being being retired, retired, retired. (retired paratrooper, retired private security, retired from locksmith)
For those interested there is an extended version of this post at alanscorner.blog under And I Thought It was About We The People
Thanks