Getting what you pay for (or don't) by @BloggersRUs

Getting what you pay for (or don't)

by Tom Sullivan

House Democrats late Monday delayed a vote on a bill providing a pay increase to members of Congress. "At least 15 Democrats" opposed going on the record for supporting a pay raise, Politico reports. Many are freshmen from competitive districts who fear opponents would use the vote as a cudgel against them in their reelection. A similar number of Republican members joined them in opposition.

Congress once passed annual cost-of-living adjustments after both parties agreed to a truce on not using the issue against each other, The Hill adds. Those days are over. Mostly.

But having "average" Americans serving in Congress brings a non-elite perspective to the pay issue. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is not exactly average, however. She achieved star status even before arriving in Washington. Before that, she was a bartender and a waitress. She favors the pay increase:

The effort got a significant boost Tuesday when House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) offered support for a pay bump, saying he doesn’t want Congress to be a place where only the wealthy can afford to serve.

Freshman progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), meanwhile, forcefully made a case to her nearly 4.5 million Twitter followers, defending giving members of Congress the cost-of-living adjustment.
Those outside the Beltway might find McCarthy's statement disingenuous. He is a career politician who came up through the ranks starting as a Young Republican. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's (AOC) rise is less traditional, with less opportunity to become institutionalized by the system.

AOC agrees with Matt Stoller on the pay issue, although it's not immediately clear she knows Matt Stoller's history on Capitol Hill.

Yep. Voting against cost of living increases for members of Congress may sound nice, but doing so only increases pressure on them to keep dark money loopholes open.

This makes campaign finance reform *harder.*

ALL workers deserve cost of living increases, incl min wage workers. https://t.co/fCdgHKx4G1

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 11, 2019

What this does is punish members who rely on a straight salary, and reward those who rely on money loopholes and other forms of self-dealing.

For example, it incentivizes the horrible kinds of legislative looting we saw in the GOP tax scam bill.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 11, 2019

AOC's Instagram videos of her new life in D.C. provide a view of serving in Congress much less shiny than movie and TV imagery. Those who make working on Capitol Hill a life goal tend to be people whose family backgrounds or financial means make it possible, she notes below. It's tougher for people like her.

Yep, it’s not just about cost of living adjustments, we’re also fighting for a living wage for interns + for strong staffer salaries, too.

DC is teeming w staffers whose parents subsidized their low-wage (or no wage) jobs.

That’s partly why many policies are out of touch. https://t.co/Rh39BDiqZx

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 11, 2019

Going into government service out of raw, do-gooder passion is beyond the means of most people not avaricious enough or power-hungry enough to turn government service into a grift. AOC sees making government service more affordable to people without trust funds a democratizing force and a hedge against corruption. There is getting big money out of politics and then there is putting enough in to keep influence peddlers and self-dealers out.

“There are really two Americas, one for the grifter class, and one for everybody else. In everybody-else land ... government is something to be avoided ... In the grifter world, however, government is ... a tool for making money,” Matt Taibbi wrote in "Griftopia."

Conservative demonizing of taxes has left government by public servants sucking wind and opened the doors to government by parasites. Lobbyists sell public-private partnerships, for example, as market-based improvements on supposed government inefficiency. Plus a way for politicians to deliver something for nothing, i.e., no new taxes. But to the grifter class, government inefficiency is government not putting enough money into their pockets fast enough. Anti-tax fervor results in collapsing bridges, crumbling roads, for-profit prisons and migrant concentration camps, sell-offs of public infrastructure, and starving public education to line the pockets of those who hate everything about government of, by, and for the people except the cash flow.

AOC is trying to play the inside-outside game. She is still fresh enough to see the corruption and has gained enough power to have some influence over national policy. The trick will be not to get so steeped in the culture of power over time that creeping group-think renders her out of touch. It happens to the best of them when they stop seeing themselves as citizen-legislators and start thinking of themselves as legislators first. It doesn't happen to everyone. But it happens slowly, almost imperceptibly, until even the best are captured.