Congress increased its operating budget this year, which no doubt will spark a lot of populist outrage. The outrage will likely be widely distributed across the ideological spectrum too, if the extremely negative response to this move at Daily Kos is any indication.
The problem with this outrage is that most of the spending overall, and most of the increase is spending, is for congressional staff. If Congress were to cut those salaries or to cut those staff, here is what would happen:
- An even higher percentage of Congressional staff would become Ivy League trust-fund babies who don't need the money. Given that Congressional staff salaries are already pretty low compared to other professional jobs in major urban areas, a very high percentage of Congressional staff are already Ivy League trust-fund babies.
Hard for me to see how the "make more Congressional staffers upper-class Ivy Leaguers" platform is a particularly populist way to improve Congressional responsiveness to the economic concerns of anyone but the top 1-10% of income earners.
- There are 35,000+ registered lobbyists in D.C. Most of those lobbyists are highly paid (5X to 10X the amount of Congressional staff) corporate shills. These lobbyists perform much of the actual congressional staffing on Capitol Hill, from fundraising, to writing legislation, to informing members of Congress about policy, to connecting members of Congress with each other and on and on. They perform these functions because they are effectively free staff for otherwise overworked and understaffed Congressional offices. They fill a staff vacuum for Congress.
If we were to cut the Congressional budget and reduce the amount of staff available to members of Congress, then these well-heeled corporate shills would perform an even greater percentage of Congressional staff functions. Again, hard for me to see how handing over an even larger percentage of the day to day operations of Congress is a particularly effective way to get Congress to become more responsive to the needs and desires of the American people.
So yeah, let's us on the left bash Congress for increasing its operating budget, most of which goes to staff. I'm sure it will be good for a little populist anger, but the actual policy we are advocating for is a further corporate takeover of government. Which is exactly what all of the right-wing, anti-government populist outrage in this same vein is designed to do.
Look, I love BarbinMD, and I am pretty pissed at Congress right now too, but if you want a government that is not run by the wealthiest people and institutions of our society, then you have to pay for it. People from middle-class backgrounds with huge college debts cannot live in Washington, D.C. on $30,000 a year. Individual members of Congress simply cannot perform all of the duties required of an effective Representative of the people without staff support. And lefties who whip up populist anger about the size of the Congressional operating budget are doing their own ideological and policy causes a real blow by advocating that we cut the Congressional budget.
And for the record, I grew up in an upper middle class household, am a part-owner of an LLC, and attended to St. Catherine's College at Oxford University. So it's not like I am bashing corporations and well-to-do Ivy Leaguers just out of spite. But hey, if you think that only people even more privileged than me should be running the country, by all means, keep advocating for cuts to the Congressional operating budget.
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