Wednesday, February 11, 2009

House Democrats reject salary increases**UPDATED

UPDATE

POLITICO
House Dems to give up pay raise
The leadership’s move comes on the heels of President Barack Obama’s decision to freeze the salaries of top White House aides. And paradoxically, it may be popular with members; already, 107 House members have signed on to co-sponsor bills that would block the 2010 raise.

Party leaders discussed the possibility of skipping the annual salary increase earlier this year, but Tuesday’s announcement marks their first official embrace of those requests.

Pelosi told House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) about the decision before announcing it to her members, and his spokesman said Tuesday night that he is in favor of it.

“We all know that American families are hurting, and we support forgoing a congressional pay raise,” said Boehner spokesman Michael Steel. “It is the reasonable thing to do.”

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House Democrats reject salary increases

By Jared Allen

Will the Republicans follow suit????

From: The Hill

Speaker Nancy Pelosi informed lawmakers Tuesday that they would not be getting automatically generated salary increases to keep pace with inflation in the next fiscal year.

Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told members of their caucus that they would be instructing the Appropriations Committee to take out of the annual spending measures language that allows for an automatic cost of living adjustment, or COLA.


The action would freeze salaries for senators, too, although the upper chamber would have to endorse the idea on its own.

Pelosi and Hoyer cited the need to have members’ salaries reflect the broader problems in the economy in deciding to freeze members’ salaries. But the idea of doing so was already gathering tremendous steam from within Democratic and Republican circles.


“I told our colleagues that because of the condition of our economy and the enormous crisis our country is in, the leadership will be instructing the Appropriations Committee not to include a COLA for next year in the Appropriations bill being put together for the fiscal year 2010,” Pelosi said.


The decision comes shortly after President Obama froze salaries for White House staff earning more than $100,000 a year.

“We’re in a context today where we have extraordinary pain in our community, people losing their jobs, our economy under great stress, and the Speaker and I have discussed, and we both agree, that it would not be appropriate for us not to take a COLA adjustment in the coming year,” Hoyer added.


Non-leadership House members and Senators currently make $174,000 a year.

(Emphasis mine.)

1 comment:

lisahgolden said...

For all their pissing and moaning about spending, I should hope that they would all forgo raises.

Or will they try to tell us how putting more money in their pockets is stimulative spending?