Members of Congress want you to know that $174,000 just isn’t enough.
“It’s funny what happens when lawmakers decide to retire: Suddenly, they’re willing to say things that they wouldn’t have said when they still had to face voters.
That’s what happened when Rep. Patrick McHenry, one of many retiring House Republicans, told an interviewer earlier this year that the $174,000 salary for rank-and-file members of both the House and the Senate was not enough.
‘Most of us don’t have wealth,’ McHenry said at the time.
Now, even more retiring lawmakers are saying the same thing — and acknowledging that they may not be saying it if they weren’t on their way out the door.
‘If I go back to my district, where the average salary in some places is $32,000, and I say, “I don’t make enough,” when I make $174,000, they would go ballistic,’ former Rep. Ken Buck, a Colorado Republican who resigned from Congress in March, told The New York Times. ‘I’d be out of office in a heartbeat.’
But Buck said it’s ‘very difficult’ for lawmakers to live on the salary when they had to maintain residences in two places.
‘When I got to Congress, I realized, holy smokes, that comes out of my pocket without reimbursement,’ Rep. Tony Cárdenas, a retiring California Democrat, told the Times.”
For the rest of the story, visit Insider here.