Spreading The Wealth Around - Christmas Comes Early On Capital Hill

Are you going to vote yourself a raise this year?

From Roger's Rules

The sotto voce announcement that Congress, after
wagging their collective head over executive pay and perks, decided to vote
itself a $2.5 million raise was a depressing portent. “With economy in
shambles,” read a headline in The Hill,
“Congress gets a raise.”
A crumbling economy, more than 2 million
constituents who have lost their jobs this year, and congressional demands of
CEOs to work for free did not convince lawmakers to freeze their own pay.
PR-wise, this should be a
Car-execs-take-private-jets-to-Washington-to-ask-for-taxpayer-bailout moment.
So where, as Bob Dole memorably asked, is the outrage?
Don’t hold your breath. What makes this
Congress-takes-some-more-money-from-your-pocket-and-puts-it-into-theirs scenario
so depressing is that people seem to have given up holding our duly-elected
representative accountable for anything short of outright peculation.
And to listen to Rod Blagojevich try to to brazen it out, even flagrant
corruption may turn out to OK.

And here's the best comment on this article.

“larger and larger swathes of the U.S. economy has been colonized by the federal government” (Roger)

Does this not justify their pay increase? They are taking more responsibilities - running banks,housing finance institutions, auto industry, trying to control the world’s weather patterns….
I get exhausted just thinking of all the wonderful stuff they do.