Guess who is getting a pay raise

[hmelton]

Merry Christmas

I ran across this today seems in January our wonderfully effective and useful congress will be giving itself a nearly 5 K dollar "cost of living" pay
raise to add to their 160 K + salaries.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2008/12 ... og-groups/

If you live in Arizona, Indiana or South Corolina and you don't support the current congressman, you need to rethink that stand and possibly start
supporting him.

/QUOTE/

Earlier this year, Rep. Harry Mitchell, a first-term Democrat from Arizona, introduced legislation that would have stopped the automatic pay adjustments from
kicking in for members next year. But the bill, which drew 34 cosponsors, died in committee.

Two other members of Congress, Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind, and Rep. Gresham Barrett, R-SC, also tried to block the wages but didn't get very far. Burton
plans to return his pay increase to the Treasury Department.

/END QUOTE/
NOTE: Read the article I've rounded numbers and left out others that have tried to stop it and other times when the automatic payraise
was skipped in the past.

Yesterday or maybe a couple of days ago I saw an article somewhere about the CEO's of several bankrupt banks walking away with hundreds of thousands of
dollars of bonus's... Was it a "reward"... for failing?.

Looks like congress is going to "reward" themselves in January, I wonder if they think their work was better than those Bankrupt CEO's.

One critical thing our founding fathers forgot to put in the constitution was a law forbiding the elected or appointed officials the ability to set thier own
pay level.

Howard Melton

God Bless

[Valles]

I don't know if I'd actually call that a bad thing. Congress is, by my memory, actually on the same pay scale as the entire federal government, and essentially defines the top.
That is, whether or not Congress itself is overpaid (and given their other perks I might be inclined to agree), there are a lot of other people in the Federal government who are making a lot less than they'd be worth on the free market... because the government, legally, can't pay them what Congress gets. So I'd want to know whether that's a global raise or one specific to the legislature before I got worked up.
===========

===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."

[ECSNorway]

$5k/congressthing * 535 congressthings = $2.6million. Pocket change compared to the overall total... but still, it's what it says about the people involved
that matters.

Now, if it's a global range, all the way down to GS1, that's a different thing entirely, I agree.
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

[hmelton]

Yes the pay raise's total cost is pocket change, but most of my problem is with the automatic and underhanded nature of that pay raise.



The automatic nature of this and other pay raises is simply a greedy and dishonest attempt at misdirection by our politicians to try and remove yet another
negative feedback from the control voters have on them.

Both parties voted this autopayraise into place years ago when it started to be clear that the current office holder was losing significant numbers of votes
every time they voted themselves a pay raise especially when there was an economic down turn..

Ultimately the government is an employee of the American people and it is never a good idea to give the employees to much control of thier own pay check.

In addition our government is a monopoly and any monopoly needs all the negative feedback mechanisms you can put into place otherwise the monopoly is going to
cause problems and failures sooner or later.

Take as an example the current problems of several American car makers. It can be argued that at least one of the many problems that put the car makers in or
near backruptcy is the unrecognized monopoly the United Auto Workers Union have over the car makers ability to gain workers for thier plants.

Another example is the teamsters unions and it's monopoly on railroad workers. It can be argued that a significant part of the trucking industry's
ability to compete so easily with the more fuel efficent train network is the fact that the trucking industry is largely non-union or at most several small
non-monopoly unions that are forced to compete against each other.

I personally think Unions should be recognized as corperations and treated as such especially when they grow to monopolistic levels of control of any
industries pool of labour.

I even go a step further and say that if back when the phone company was being broken up they had continued and forced the UAW or United Auto Workers to break
up into several competing unions then today we would be seeing at least one less car company looking at bankruptcy.

The Government is by necessity a monopoly so other methods of enforcing negative feedback into it's operation are needed. The more votes the voters have
to make or the more decisions the government employees have to take direct responsibility for the better they will do thier job.

Valles you mentioned that it might be a good idea to keep the pay comparable to the public sector and that isn't a bad argument, but that argument is
probably going to soon become an argument for giving them a pay cut. Our country is entering a economic down turn that will almost certainly see large sections
of the public sector's wages being cut and if we want to keep our government employees at pay levels comparable with the current economic conditions then
they will be looking at having their wages cut or at least frozen.

howard melton

God bless

[Black Aeronaut]

Problem is that those autoworkers, even as much as they're paid, are having a hard time keeping things together.

Consider this. My father is a Printed Cricuit Board Designer. He is not a guru at the trade, but his name is recognized. When he drops his resume somewhere,
people take notice. He is paid accordingly: never anything less than forty-five dollars an hour. He usually puts in a pretty good amount of overtime too. And
yet, my parents still have trouble making ends meet for one reason or another. I never went to college, neither has my sister, and nor will any of my brothers
unless they pay for it themselves. They're in their fifties and they've only recently been able to start putting away money for retirement. This is, by
no means, due to poor financial planning. It is just life, and it happens.

But mostly it is because I have a large family (something this nation seems to be economically opposed to). Yes, contraceptives were used. All of my siblings
were 'accidents' so don't try and say anything about it. And if anyone even sneezes the word 'Abortion' then fuck you sideways with a
cactus wrapped in razor wire and a three-day-old rubber from a siphilitic whore in New Orleans in the middle of Mardi Gras with a lemon twist. God I hate it
when people take that kind of attitude about population control. Bad enough the Chinese do it.

Anyhow, our grocery bills are monsterous and the recession hasn't helped much. Nor has it helped with the pickings for jobs. And and my family is still
reeling from the dot-com crash because of a foreclosure they endured during that time, to say nothing of the other debts going along with it.

So the next time you want to say "Wahhhh! Auto workers are so greedy!" stop and think about what your saying. These people are trying to put their
kids through college (say about $120,000 per kid for four years, and that's just the tuition), keep a roof over their heads (say about $300,000 on
average?) in some attempt to live a comfortable life (Three cars? I'd say about another 100,000 right there - they get a discount - this totals over
$500,000. Larger than their yearly saleries, no? And to say nothing of every day cost of living.), not vacation in the Hamptons or Fiji or something stupid.
You want to see wastefulness? Go look at the shit upperclass throw out as garbage. Pretty good way to score yourself a new computer or even a sound system.

Some actor blew a few mill to build houses in Louisiana? Hah. I'll be a lot more impressed if he sold off his mansion and lived in a place that, while
nice, doesn't cost well over $500,000. That kinda money will buy you a nice quiet plot of land in Texas with an equally nice house, security to go with it
if you really want it. Airstrip will be extra and you can probably share that with your neighbors, as is the trend these days.

I hate CEOs with a pink and purple passion. These people make so much money and for what? Managing a business so it doesn't go under? I understand that
this is the nature of a corporation. After all, with so many people owning a piece of the action, it makes sense to hire one guy to do the driving. But it
doesn't make sense to pay them millions upon millions for a job an ape could do. Albeit a smart and clever ape, but all the same. I'm pretty sure that
if you present the problems a corporation has to an ape in a way it could understand, then it'll figure out a viable solution, albeit one with a certain
brutal eloquence to it.

Really, what these corporations should have been doing is instead of dumping jobless people into an increasing problem of people not buying things, they should
have taken the hit on their chins like honest business people - in the dividends of their stock. Not like anyone but the upperclass really depends on that bit
of income, and even the richest people have some rainy day funds saved up somewhere in a mutual fund or something that's collecting interest. Not like its
gonna kill 'em overnight to not get paid when their shit doesn't fly right. Greedy fucks.

These are the people that have decided to outsource. They've outsourced our products, our jobs, and some of them even live outside the US as well. After
all, service just as good can be found in a third world nation for a fraction of the cost in America. And in America, everyone but the upper class suffers for
it, because the upperclass have simply taken the money and run.

I don't see any autoworkers taking off for Aruba.

[ECSNorway]

Really, what these corporations should have been doing is instead of dumping jobless people into an increasing problem of people not buying things, they should have taken the hit on their chins like honest business people - in the dividends of their stock. Not like anyone but the upperclass really depends on that bit of income, and even the richest people have some rainy day funds saved up somewhere in a mutual fund or something that's collecting interest. Not like its gonna kill 'em overnight to not get paid when their shit doesn't fly right. Greedy fucks.

The problem with this is what's called a Due Diligence clause. It's part of the deal that comes along with being a public corporation.

What it means is simple: You do not work for the company. You do not work for the employees. You work for the stockholders, because they own the company.

What it means is that, in exchange for the investment in the company that that stock represents, you are expected to produce for them, in rising stock prices and rising dividends.

And if you fail to do so, they have a right to sue your ass and get you fired.

Even if -- ESPECIALLY if -- you're the CEO.

Up until the 90's, people rarely did this unless they thought you were running the company into the ground. Then it happened a few times, and CEO's got scared of it. Now they go out of their way to avoid it, and cover their own asses.
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.