March 16, 2009 – Congress just received another pay raise. Members now make more than $174,000 each year. That’s not bad for a full time job, but Congress isn’t in session year round. In addition to the pay, they also have an expense account and they get a lot of nice perks.
You may think that it’s always been this way. That members of Congress have always made a nice living. You would be incorrect.
When the country was founded, members of Congress received their pay on a per diem basis; only being paid for the days that they were in session. Their pay was not supposed to be a substitute for a real job. It was there to help them offset costs. But over the years, Congress has taken more and more of your tax dollars to support themselves; their pay has risen significantly faster than inflation. Maybe its time to return to the payment method used in 1789; the year that congressional pay began.
In 1789 members of congress were paid a $6 per day per diem. Accounting for inflation, that amounts to around $200 per day now. On a full time basis, that means that members of Congress should actually be making $52,000 annually. Over the past ten years, Congress has averaged 140 days in session. So on a per diem basis they should actually be making $28,000 without any expense account whatsoever.
Members of Congress will tell you that they have had to give themselves raises because it is expensive to keep two homes; one in Washington, DC and one in their home states or districts. But being a congressional representative or senator was never intended to be a full time job. The members were expected to earn a living on their own. Those elected to office were supposed to be serving a higher calling to public service. They saw their public service as a duty to their country. Not a way to make a living. How could your representative possibly understand your life or business if they didn’t have to work for an honest living themselves? My, how things change.
From 1789 until 1814, the House of representative didn’t get one single pay raise. In 1795, the Senate got a raise of $1 per day, but they reduced it back to $6 per day the following year.
In 1815 Congress raised its pay to $1,500 annually, but in 1817 they went back being paid on per diem; then set at $8 per day. For the next 38 years, Congress didn’t get a single pay raise. This was the longest period in US history without a single congressional raise.
In 1855, Congress gave itself the first big pay raise ever – but certainly not the last. They left the per diem system of pay behind forever and began paying themselves $3,000 per year. This amounted to around a 50% raise. From that point on, Congress regularly increased its pay, keeping well ahead of inflation in most cases.
There was one notable exception to the continual pay hikes. By 1925, Congress had raised its salary to $10,000 annually. That amounts to roughly 190% of the wages they received in 1789 (if they had been employed full time). After the start of the Great Depression, they reduced their salary to $9,000 in 1932 and to $8,500 in 1933, but from there, salaries began to creep up again. By 1935 – still in the midst of the Depression – salaries were back to the $10,000 level. Since then, Congress has never cuts its own pay again.
In terms of real dollars, congressional pay held at close to the 1925 levels – hovering between 190% and 220% of the pay made in 1789 – until around 1990.
In January 1991, the House of Representatives received a 28% increase in pay. Retail inflation that year only ran around 5%. Not to be outdone, The Senate received the same raise in August of that year. The reason for the big jump in pay was that in 1989, the method used for calculating increases changed so that it was based on increases in private sector wages. After that huge bump in salary, their wages have been tied to inflation. That’s the good news. The bad news is that because of the way the system is currently set up, they don’t have to vote for a salary increase every year. It just happens automatically. That way, there is no messy public scrutiny.
The point of providing this information is so that American’s understand that Congress has abominated the system initiated by the founders of this country. In 1789 public service was a duty. To serve in Congress was an honor and a privilege but never intended as a means to support ones self. Today, we see members of Congress without any moral backbone at all, hiding from public review through a system that rewards them automatically regardless of their job performance.
If the economy is any indication of how well Congress has performed of late, then it might be better to tie congressional pay to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. That’s dropped by around 50% in the last year and a half. But that’s not what Congress wants. They just accepted their latest pay raise even though foreclosures are at record highs and bankruptcies are on the rise.
Congress is not worth what it is being paid. It may be time to turn back the clock and put them on per diem pay. At least that way they would be incented to work more days.
It may also be time to change the Constitution and give matters regarding congressional pay to the states. Ideally, representatives would be paid by their states rather than by the federal government. This would allow voters to determine the congressional wages for the people that represent their states. And it would allow state legislatures the ability to withhold pay in the event their representatives voted in favor of proposals that were against the state’s interests. It would make Congress accountable. Now that’s “change” we can all believe in.
byJim Malmberg
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