After 15 years, give Congress a raise

Here’s a campaign slogan you will not hear from any of the nearly 1,000 people who are running for Congress this year: “Give us a raise.” But somebody really should run on it.  

Not someone who actually has a truly competitive race, mind you. That would be political suicide. But as 90 percent of the races for Congress have pretty much already been decided in the primaries anyway, that leaves plenty of folks in “safe” seats who could at least make the argument.

It is an easy argument to make. Pay for members of Congress has been frozen since 2009. Yes, the $174,000 salary is roughly three times the annual salary in this country. But it is less than the average starting pay for a new lawyer in New York. Without trying to draw any unintended comparisons to the jobs that each of them do, it is also less than one-third of what the top-paid NBA mascot makes.

Even within the Capitol itself, there is something out of whack on pay. Nearly 800 congressional staffers make more than the $174,000 their bosses make.  

There are lots of arguments against giving raises to members of Congress, of course, the most popular is probably that they haven’t earned it. But that isn’t entirely fair. Members of Congress are doing exactly what we want them to do. Yes, Congress’ approval rating may be lower than that of head lice, but that is as an institution. It reflects how we feel about Congress as a whole, or, more likely, somebody else’s member of Congress. 

The overwhelming majority of us wholeheartedly approve of what our representatives are doing. If we didn’t, we’d vote them out. Of the 226 members who have had to face a primary challenge this year so far, 225 have won. Across all races, incumbents won 94 percent of the time in the last election cycle.

So we can say we think Congress is doing a terrible job, but we keep reelecting nearly all of its members anyway. And the same rule applies to voters as it does to politicians: We should believe not what they say, but what they do. 

Voters, it seems, think that current members of Congress deserve, at the least, to keep their jobs. It shouldn’t be unreasonable, then, to suggest that the jobs they do get cost-of-living adjustments.

Or maybe there’s another way to justify a pay raise. Maybe it will induce better people to run for office.  

Look at it this way: the people you are going to get today are often either people who either don’t need the money or would not be able to make more than $174,000 doing anything else.

The good news is that there is a relatively simple and fair way to solve this problem, which has the added benefit of perhaps being political palatable to voters: Tie congressional pay to household income.

Today, the average household income in this country is around $75,000. That means a member of Congress makes roughly 233 percent of what the average American family brings in. Setting congressional pay at that level permanently would tie lawmakers’ salaries to the success of their constituents. When American’s do better, our representatives make more. When the citizenry struggles, our lawmakers would share in the pain. 

And while the general effect would be something like a cost-of-living increase, that would certainly not always be the case. In 2022, for example, congressional pay would have gone down by more than 2 percent, because that is exactly what happened to American families. 

Instead of taking such a straightforward approach, Congress has chosen to deal with its own economic woes by doing what Congress does best: Creating a byzantine set of programs designed mostly to obfuscate what they are really trying to accomplish while allowing some of them to say with a straight face that they didn’t just give themselves a raise. Thus, Congress now has a cost-of-living reimbursement program that costs millions but is paid out without receipts.

How much better to just come out and say it, and then vote for it. Yes, it would be a politically dangerous thing to do. Maybe the incumbent reelection rate might drop all the way down into the high 80s.  

But it needs to be done, before we end up with only millionaires and the otherwise unemployable running the country.

Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman from South Carolina, is a contributor to NewsNation. He served as director of the Office of Management and Budget, acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and White House chief of staff under President Donald Trump.