You haven't done your homework. Congressional salary is $174,000 per year. There are strict limits on outside income. While in DC (an expensive area), you are supporting a second household. Tough commute from say Oregon as well. Congressmen often double- and triple-up in Capitol Hill rowhouses to save on costs. Some have been known to live in their offices while Congress is in session. Find top-level corporate executives who will work for and like that. 14-16 hour days are meanwhile the norm, and the actual name for what you call recesses is "district work periods". This is when they go home and do town halls and meet with civic and business leaders to learn what the problems are and what might be done about them. And then they do luncheons, parades, elementary school Q&A's, county fairs, supermarket openings, and all that other ceremonial stuff. And then they address some fund-raising dinner and pal around and glad-hand until they have to crash so they can get up early and do it all over again the next day. As for all those frilly perks, they have exactly the same choices in health and life insurance as any other federal employee. And that fabulous retirement system consists of Social Security, a tiny defined-benefit pension (typically at age 62 and funded by contributions of 1.3% of pay), plus whatever they can make out of a 401-k. Even for those who come from rather modest backgrounds, their years in Congress tend to be the "lean years" in terms of pay and perks over their lifetimes.
These aren't seventh grade science projects they are working on. PPACA, the farm bill, the energy bill, the highway bill...these are broad-ranging programs. And bills in their final form are written in legislative language. Difficult to read even for the practiced. I kind of think that the problem is that our citizens just don't know enough about how their government works, so they make completely wrong assumptions and then complain when poltiicians aren't behaving in the ways they have assumed that they should.
No, they didn't. Reagan spent quite a lot of time in Santa Barbara just as Nixon had spent quite a lot of time in San Clemente. And none of it raised an eyebrow. It was just a part of business as usual until the rabid-right got fired up after 1994.
What non-defense spending should be cut? And don't give me that pork, waste, and fat crap. Give me some examples of agencies and programs where you think cuts could and should be made. Here, I'll give you some fries with that. These are all the spending items from the FY 2011 budget that totalled at least $25 billion...
Insider trading? Get out of the slums, and campaign funds have to be spent on campaigns. Many lawmakers do of course land lucrative deals after they leave Congress. Look at the package Jim DeMint will be receiving to be director of lying over at the Heritage Foundation. But the same is true for top legislative aides and executive branch employees. They too receive big step-ups in income when they return to the private sector. This is because they are all underpaid while they are in the public sector.
No, it isn't. The process of crafting legislation in committee is well known to all who take part ion it. Amendments by the score are proposed, debated, and voted upon. The only extra provision an appropriator could "slip in" would be an earmark. These are a necessary and highly efficient means of getting needed small potatos funding to important projects and there is nothing at all worng with them so long as they are subject to plenty of sunshine. What you want to call pork meanwhile amounts to getting something that is going to be done anyway done in your district instead of the other guy's. And isn't one of the reasons you elect a representative to promote the interests of your district and of those who live there? Bringing home one's share of the bacon would appear to be a part of what a Congressperson is paid to do.
Very thoughtful. You may want to make a note of the fact that it is only 7,628 miles from New York City to Mogadishu. There's a few stops, but you can do it in something over 30 hours.
Red-herring??
You'd cut VA hospital care????
Yeah, this is what happens to one right-winger after another when the rubber meets the road. They rail about the need for spending cuts, but after they get past their meaningless rites of wailing over waste, fraud, and abuse that doesn't exist, they can't find anything to cut that they could make an actual argument for, so they wimp out. They don't seem to understand that the share of our GDP spent through the public sector is so much smaller than what it is in other prosperous countries because spending here has been kept pretty close to a minimum of necessity.
If you mean re vacations, as any competent source would confirm, Bush really was the most absent President in any of our lifetimes. Otherwise, there really was a war in which people really were dying. There really was unemployment and declining real incomes for the majority. There really was torture and abuse and illegal surveillance and lying, and on and on and on. It's hard to stack complaints about things that were actually happening up against phony whines over too much vacation, a topic that is part of a far broader but just as vapid field.
He already did that in August. Has it mattered any?
A country that produces 22% of everything produced anywhere in the world is not broke. It's merely the limits of your own understanding that lead you to believe such things.
Dude, even with the recent spike in emergency support payments to those most affected by the Great Bush Recession, overall spending is on par with historical standards. The green line below is actual spending in FY 1960 stated in constant 2005 dollars and then expanded at a rate of 3.25% per year to allow for population and productivity growth. The red line is actual spending in constant 2005 dollars over the past fifty years plus.
We haven't paid off the public debt since 1836, and no one has any plans to do so now. We in fact won't ever pay off our public debt and neither will any other prosperous economy that is carrying debt which is all of them. National governments are not like households you know. Whole dfferent ballgame. When people tell you that the federal government should have to budget just like you do, they are lying to you. That's the only word for it. What they should tell you is that the federal government should have to budget just the way you would if you were immortal and had both taxing authority and currency-issuing authority. Do you think any of those factors would make a difference in your personal approach to finance?
Clinton was a fiscal moderate and so is Obama. The difference is that Bush-41 left a small mess for Clinton and Bush-43 left a huge mess for Obama.
Polls say they are interested in something better than the Great Bush Recession. They want a government that works, not one that has been drowned in a bathtub.
You only demean yourself in demeaning his personal record, and maybe consider what the Republican alternatives were. My friends, those two would have made Jethro Clampett look attractive.
Too much Karl Rove and Dick Morris. Time to unplug those coffee pots. They just make you dumber every day that you drink from them.