Congress Loses a Champion of Cutting Congressional Pay

On Sunday January 22, 2012 Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) announced that she will be resigning from Congress.  Rep. Gifford’s prime legacy will be the shooting that occurred in January of 2011.  As Congress returns from their winter break, taxpayers should also remember another legacy that Rep. Giffords will leave, her desire to cut congressional pay.  In July of 2011 Our Generation and the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) released a report titled, “Are Taxpayers Getting Their Money’s Worth? An Analysis of Congressional Compensation.”  The report exposed that Members of Congress receive a salary of $174,000 per year, as well as generous fringe benefits that increase their total compensation to $285,000 per year.  From the very beginning Rep. Giffords was supportive of the report and sent a “Dear Colleague” letter asking members of Congress to co-sponsor legislation to cut congressional compensation.  Rep. Giffords also urged the Super Committee to consider a congressional pay cut as part of their mandate to cut spending by more than $1 trillion over ten years (see Huffington Post article here).

Members of Congress are among the highest-paid 5 percent of American workers. Unlike the private sector, where salaries are earned from willing customers in exchange for a product or service, congressional salaries and benefits are taken out of taxpayer’s pockets without any requirement for what Americans receive in return.

The generous pay and benefits Congress has provided for itself are unacceptably high when those who work in virtually all industries in the private sector have seen their wages flatten out, or even cut.

Those who were able to keep their jobs are constantly evaluated by “pay for performance” standards. It is clear that these performance standards are not applied to Congress, as the country is saddled with a $14.3 trillion debt and a $1.5 trillion deficit, and weeks of debt ceiling negotiations have left the nation in the same economic predicament as when the talks began.

Another way to measure congressional salaries is to compare them with the average wages earned by private-sector employees. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an average full-time employee in the United States earns annual pay of $50,875.

This means that members of Congress make 3.4 times more than the average full-time American worker. In addition, on average, legislators in other parts of the developed world receive salaries equal to 2.3 times the average wage of a full-time worker. By these standards, Members of Congress are among the highest-paid legislators in the world.

Finally, the relative disproportionality of congressional pay does not disappear if one compares congressional pay with the pay of more educated private-sector employees.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, private-sector workers holding master’s degrees earned 63 percent more than the average full-time American worker, or about $83,000. Even by this standard, congressional salaries are more than double those paid to well-educated, private-sector workers.

While most taxpayers believe members of Congress should be adequately compensated for their efforts, it is excessive to make them among the best compensated employees in the American work force without holding them responsible for their job performance.

Rep. Giffords will be missed by many in Congress, and, TPA will miss her because she was one of only a handful members of Congress who had the courage to call for a congressional pay cut.