Legislative pay raise payback is self serving

A staff-written article in today's Erie Ties-News reports that nine of ten state legislators from northwestern PA. say they are returning, or will return to the state or donate to charity the automatic 2.8 cost of living pay increases they received effective the beginning of this year, about $2,200 for rank and file legislators. Those in leadership positions voted themselves more.

One online commentor wrote: "Let's remember our legislators, all 253 of them, are the second hoghest paid in the US. Only Calif. are paid more. With 67 counties PA could do with 100 legislators not the 253 we have. That alone will save 200 million."

I don't know whether "hoghest" was a Freudian slip, a pun, or a typo, but it's highly appropos. While PA legislators have the second-highest salaries, their total compensation packages including, per diem, travel allowance, staff allowance, health and pension benefits, etc., are the highest in the land, making the PA legislature the costliest in the nation. By most reckonings, it's also the most corrupt.

If those legislators who say they are contributing their pay raises to charity think they are off the hook, they must think that charity begins at home, because they are the beneficiaries nevertheless of the pay hike by virtue of the fact that they are using it to buy votes, in effect, a bribe.

Whether they return or donate the increment, it still goes towards their eventual retirement benefits.

The article doesn't tell us how long these legislators intend to return or donate the increment. Is it just until the end of the fiscal or calendar year, or the end of the legislative biennium, or beyond? Or just until the next middle-of-the-night/no-public-hearing pay raise comes along?

The article also does not report whether these legislators will support legislation now pending which would reduce the size of the legislature by half. Like most Erie Times-News articles, it filters self-serving legislative pronouncements through rose-colored glasses.