Niki Kelly, writing for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, has an article entitled Annual pay raise idea wins Senate nod. As usual, I’m a little bit torn here. I don’t mind legislators making a little more money, and I think the current system is a bad idea. The “part time” legislators have a base salary of $11,600 which has been the same since 1985. But, there are a variety of add-ons, most significantly their per diem, that turn the average compensation for legislators to about $40,000 per year. These back-door methods of compensating the legislators make the system feel a little corrupt even when they aren’t and even where legislators aren’t being unduly compensated.
But, it’s essentially the fault of the citizenry that the compensation system hasn’t been more forthright. We freak out every time anyone in the government considers a pay raise. The attempt to deal with that in the pending legislation is to tie legislative salary to judicial salary which has apparently been given an automatic pay raise mechanism. So, now we have automatic pay increases for legislators. That’s not necessarily a good thing either.
What I’d like is a system where legislative pay is forthright, where legislators themselves have to vote directly on future pay increases for themselves, and where the citizenry and political opponents don’t go ballistic if the pay increase is reasonable. However, because I’m not suicidal, I won’t be holding my breath until this comes to pass.
Technorati Tags: SB401-2007
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