Category: Legislative Bodies

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What are you worth, and how does it compare?

What we are getting paid for what we do displays in a very crude way what we are worth to society. Crude in the sense that it’s a very one dimensional measurement, but still relevant, since most of our society consists of corporations and their task, in turn, is to maximize the value for their owners.

Of course that means that what you get paid is the lower than the value you contribue, or at least it should be. That is how corporations make money. By paying you less than the value you contribute. If you include all secondary costs that you incur, then the difference between your contribution and your cost is what you bring in as profit for the company. The larger that difference, the more valuable you should be to the company, regardless of how much you are paid.

Of course, the public sector doesn’t try to make profit. They try to provide services for the public in an as efficient manner as possible. As salaried in the private sector go up, keeping good people working in the public sector is getting increasingly difficult. The people have to have other drivers than only salary. Sense of service or status might be some.

However, I sometimes wonder about the priorities that society shows by pay disparities. Is Judge Judy doing a job that is worth 100 time what Justice Scalia does? A US Supreme Court Justice is paid around $200,000 per year. Judge Judy gets around $20,000,000. Along the same lines, are the efforts of Rush Limbaugh worth more than 100 times than the efforts of the President of the USA? The president gets approximately $400,000 per year. Mr. Limbaugh earns about $50,000,000 per year.

I could bring up a lot of other misalignments in reward versus value, even if you look solely at the private sector. But I think it’s worth to keep in mind that the average family income in the USA is in the region of $50,000. That is for a family, not for a person. That means that the effort of 1,000 families is valued at the same level as Mr. Limbaugh.

I believe that if nothing is done about the income disparity, the country of USA will slide into a more and more dire financial situation. Let me know what you think.

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Doing what’s right for the country or doing what sounds right

As I am writing this I have to admit that I feel slightly confused. We are still in an economic downturn, and because of that people are unhappy, which means that they have once again voted in a group of people whose policy choices got us here in the first place. But that is not so surprising. If you only have two choices it’s easy to choose the other just because you are unhappy. There aren’t any other alternatives. Well apathy, maybe, but that does not make anybody happy either.

No, my confusion stems from an even simpler situation. There is a federal office called the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that is non-partisan and really only crunches numbers and scenarios to see what the effect is of different political decisions. They were instrumental in getting the health care bill balanced last year, although many of the people in congress chose not to listen to all the data. And this is happening again.

The CBO has come out with a report saying that the most effective thing Congress can do right now to stimulate the economy is to make sure that unemployed people get unemployment benefits. The reason is simple. They live on a tight budget, and any money coming in is spent, which in turn turns the wheels of businesses small and large. This in turn has the effect of improving the economy so that these companies need to hire people, lowering unemployment and increasing spending capital. The CBO has also found that the least effective thing that Congress can do is to reduce income tax. Also not entirely hard to understand, since it would leave people who already earn an (un)reasonable amount of money with slightly more money. Money they will be more likely to save, since the economy is bad.

Are you with me so far? Now comes the conundrum. Why is it that everybody in the GOP says that the most important thing is to make sure that the top 10% earners get to keep their tax cuts. Tax cuts that have had their income increase with 10% year during the 2000s, while the rest have not had any net gain at all. Keeping these tax cuts is so important that they would rather have the economy continue to flag and keep the deficit, since they are unwilling to even consider paying for it. Unemployment benefits on the other hand, they need to be paid for, if they are even considering them at all.

Now I ask the follow-up question. Who benefits from this? Well, as we know, it’s the top 10% earners in the country. That means that if all of them vote Republican, they would constitute about 20% of the GOP vote, since overall it’s fairly even between the parties. Even if we assume that they have 100% voting record (Meg Whitman proves that it’s not the case), as opposed to the 50% average that you might get in a general election means that they can be maybe 40% of the republican voters.

Why does the GOP in Congress want to shaft 60% of the people who elected them? And why do that 60% constituency continue to vote for them? If what they did was because it was the best thing to do for the country I could understand it. But it isn’t. And I don’t. I wish somebody could explain.

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Senate Voting Saturday night

On Saturday night I was watching the vote to proceed to debate on the Health Care Reform in the Senate, or Motion to Invoke Cloture on the Motion to Proceed to H.R. 3590 as it’s officially called. Is that a proof that I need to get Life 2.0? I don’t know. However, I was stunned by the lack of drama. The clerk called roll and everybody said yea or nay as predicted strictly along the caucus lines. The only exception is Sen. Geaorge Voinovich, who chose not to vote, but that took me some time to figure out. After a brief pause the clerk then read out the names of the people for and the people against, and then the presiding senator, Chris Dodd, asked if anybody wanted to change their vote, and then that was it.

Compared that to the house vote. There you heard a buzz on the floor, and applause as the 218 threshold was passed. In the Senate. Nothing. No wonder that C-Span is the only channel that broadcasts these kind of things live. The normal cable 24-hour news cycle people just don’t have time for these kind of drawn out, quiet affairs. I’m so glad there is a C-Span (or three).