Members of Congress; not paid for life; not over paid and not doing their job … and whose fault is that?

2013

On this blog there are numerous articles related to members of Congress; their pay, their retirement, do they pay Social Security, what health care do they receive, etc. In fact, those articles are among the top views and have been for several years.

Americans seem obsessed with the fact that members of Congress are getting generous pay and benefits they don’t deserve. Much of this is being fostered by misinformation circulating around the Internet.

The fact is there is nothing wrong with the pay and benefits received by members of Congress, they don’t receive pay for life, their pensions if they stay in Congress long enough, are not overly generous, they do pay Social Security, they have no special health plan and pay the same for health insurance as do millions of other government workers, that amount being well in line with the private sector.

So why all this obsession with Congress and its compensation? Americans are looking for an easy route to venting their frustration with Congress and if you can prove they are overpaid and under-worked we achieve some strange measure of satisfaction.

Unfortunately, Americans are barking up the wrong tree. They elect to Congress individuals on the extreme right and the extreme left who have no hope of achieving their extreme goals. They elect people who tell them what they want to hear while ignoring facts and reality. They punish those who do tell the truth. They elect and re-elect individuals of low moral values and sometimes outright crooks based on … well, I don’t know what except perhaps inertia.

Americans allow individuals to make Congress a career and with each passing year these individuals become more detached from the real world and more entwined with special interest groups. We elect mindless unthinking drones who follow the party line and fall into place when told to do so. We elect individuals who are not strategic, but focused on the short-term. We ignore unintended consequences and the interrelationship of the things we seek to change.

Rather than being focused on a thirty-year tenure Senator’s pension, we should be focused on why he was in Congress for thirty-years and what he accomplished. Rather than pay, we need to focus on performance. We need to limit terms in Congress to allow more independence of Members and greater focus on doing the right thing rather than doing the right thing to get re-elected.

Electing individuals with extreme views on the left or right is counterproductive and yet while most Americans claim to be frustrated with this extremism, we still elect such individuals year after year.

We have gotten to the point where Congress does not work. We are acting as Americans in a way that calls into question the validity of our Republic and of a democracy. We are out of control!

Is there hope for change? Not unless Americans change and from what I observe this generation is unlikely to do that. We have lost our spark, our drive, our accountability and to a large extent our personal responsibility. We have become what Americans used to criticize in other societies. Americans are more interested in what the other guy has and what can be given to them rather than on ways to achieve their own success.

What, me worry?