Underpaid Entry Level Employees
I read this blog article today (Sorry I can’t get the link thingy to work)
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/members-congress-paid-enough-165641960.html
When did $174,000 a year, plus some seriously good benefits, become crappy wages? Even without the benefits, I wouldn’t complain about making $174,000 a year. Hell, I’d take the job just for the vacation time that they get.
Most American workers make far less than $50,000 a year with little or no benefits. Some workers also get shot at on a regular basis for way less than $100,000 a year. Exactly how much are we currently paying our entry level military personnel again? Most workers are expected to get their job done no matter how much time it may take to accomplish the tasks that they are assigned. How much time do you think a public school teacher has to put in at their job to get our children to a point that they can intellectually compete, let alone win? Last time I checked, if I remember correctly, weren’t entry level teachers making less than $25,000 a year?
Even working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all 52 weeks of the year, $174,000 a year works out to be about $19.92 an hour. Kind of makes the federal minimum wage look like chump change doesn’t it? Oh, wait, $7.25 an hour IS chump change. IMHO, anyway.
If the Representatives mentioned (or any others not mentioned) in the article don’t like the wages or hours of their political positions then why did they seek election to them in the first place? Swooned with the power of it all, I imagine. If they were better off in their regular lives, why didn’t they just stay there? I’m sure the rest of us probably wish they had.
It will be interesting to see if they seek re-election in the future since they’ve found the job is just not what it must have been cracked up to be. I know I wouldn’t blame them if they resigned tomorrow. I hate to see anything suffer. Especially us.
I say we vote them out ASAP and free them up to find better jobs. When $170,000 per year isn’t enough, I think it’s safe to say there’s a hole in their souls that will never get filled. 😯
I don’t know of any first world nation with a minimum wage as sucky as yours. IMO, increasing it puts more money directly into consumers hands to truly stimulate your economy and negates the need for it to trickle down.
I think the doubling of politicians remuneration or bringing it in line with median executive level salaries would be a good thing coupled with publicly funded election campaigns. The real salaries of your politicians are indirectly distorted by the lobbying industry. You don’t want your best and brightest earning less than tradesman from other countries.
The old saying, “you pay peanuts, you get monkeys” just keeps popping up in my head when I think of this. I could live with them having all the perks they have now if it meant that special interests couldn’t buy their way to the front of the line.
I think their salaries should be exactly what the Median income is.
Then they might work harder for the People of the United States.
No amount of money stops corruption. I think Money causes corruption.
This is from Wikipedia and is census data…
“Income distribution
Of those individuals with income who were older than 25 years of age, over 42% had incomes below $25,000 while the top 10% had incomes exceeding $82,500 a year. The distribution of income among individuals differs substantially from household incomes as 42% of all households had two or more income earners. As a result 20.5% of households have six figure incomes, even though only 6.24% of Americans had incomes exceeding $100,000. The following chart shows the income distribution among all 211,832,000 individuals aged 15 or higher as recorded by the United States Census Bureau.”
Link to chart….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States
Very few earn what these gents are whining about. 😉
Newly elected congressmen should be paid entry level salaries. That means minimum wages, no benefits for at least the first 90 days and then they must pay their share and they should also have to pay into their retirement accounts. If it was like this, they would have more interest in helping those at the bottom rather than those at the top.