Scanning through the comments here, someone mentioned the idea of cutting spending by chopping congressmembers’ pay.
I was thinking about that just the other day, in terms of an idea attributed to Ben & Jerry: I don’t know if it’s still in effect, but they had a policy of linking the CEO’s pay to that of the line workers, such that the big cheese could only make 10 times as much as the worker bee.
Why don’t we do this with our representatives? We could link congressional pay to the minimum wage.
The federal minimum wage for covered, nonexempt employees is $5.15 per hour. At 1,000 hours — they are in session about half the year — with a 10x multiplier, they would get $51,500: about a third of the $154,700 they get currently. If you can believe it, they started at $6/day.
I think it’s time we did something about this. You could always sign the petition.