Public official compensation has been in the news lately. A report came out that state legislators, despite being “part time,” can make more than part-time money when you count per diem.
Base salary for Indiana lawmakers is just $24,140, but members collect a generous per diem for food and lodging. Legislators receive $159 a day even if they live close enough to the Statehouse to stay at home during the session or if they dine at a lobbyist’s expense.
Leadership apparently ends up making about $65 – $70,000 when leadership bonuses are figured in. Meanwhile, there was a hue and cry over a proposal to raise compensation for Marion County officials. The proposal would have raised the mayor’s salary from $95,000 to $125,000 and council salaries from $11,400 to $16,400.
Raising lawmaker compensation is deeply unpopular. This stems from a variety of factors. People don’t like government. It’s easy to complain that government spends too much as it is. Lawmakers should be ordinary citizens, and ordinary citizens often make much less than lawmakers. Lawmakers are, in effect, giving themselves a pay raise which is always unseemly. But, up to a certain level anyway (I think there are diminishing returns as salaries climb higher), you get what you pay for. And when you look at the overall budgets of the State and Marion County that these officials are charged with overseeing, sweating these salaries seems penny wise, pound foolish. Indiana has a budget of $15 billion and Marion County has a budget of a billion dollars. The mayor’s salary is something like 1/10,000th of the County’s budget.
I don’t expect the intense resistance to public salaries will decline any time soon, but I find it tough to get very excited about what usually ends up being a very minor part of the public budget.
Wasn’t there some hue and cry at one point about the extraordinarily generous retirement package? Something like the state match 3 or 4-times what the legislators contributed? However I may be mistaken about that. The current retirement package looks similar to many other state-run plans.
Sounds familiar — here is some stuff from the Indiana Law Blog from 2006.
I recall it being for all elected officials, and it was why Richard Mourdock quit his job early so as to lock in the higher benefits. Could be wrong.
This is an interesting and troubling issue within Indiana. Salaries for Indiana State Workers are some of the lowest in the nation. Yet legislators are restrained by relatively weak conflict of interest rules. And I am old enough to remember the patronage hiring practices and the “two-percent club,” the requirement that certain state workers kick back two percent of their salary to the party in power. But you get the government you pay for and the government that the government can steal from you. Hoosiers ask for little and appear to settle for even less.
Sure is a different attitude than they have about teachers.
Spot on Stuart!
How much of their income can legislators dump into their retirement? If a legislator has another job, he can theoretically use his legislative income as a retirement fund, and if he can dump the whole $24k into a 403b and it’s matched 4x, that’s $124k per year in a 403b, right? From there, doing the math will give you some big money, just for one term. And that’s all tax deferred. At least that’s the best case scenario.