Sunday, October 30, 2011

House Representatives are Working Themselves to Death in Washington

Anyone catch the article in USA Today with the headline "House Democrats say GOP wants too many days off"?

It seems the house Republicans have turned in a calendar that only has the house in session about one out of every three days for next year or 109 days total. Let me think about that a minute. 5 days per week x 52 weeks is 260 days per year which is what the rest of us work minus holidays and vacations. Now of course our house representatives are certainly supposed to spend a few days at work in their own home states so this 109 day number is certainly skewed as to how many days our representatives actually do work. Leave it to the lazy old Republicans to try to get out of work but when you look back to when the Democrats controlled the house in 2008 they worked a whooping 119 days or a full 10 days more that the Republicans now propose.

  • Republicans calander - $175,000 annual salary divided by 109 days = $1,605.50 per day
  • Democrat calendar - $175,000 annual salary divided by 119 days = $1,470.58 per day
  • My Calendar - $30,000 annual salary divided by 260 days = $115.38 per day plus all the donated overtime I can endure. And for this I say a prayer of thanks everyday as I am bringing home an above average salary for Montana.
I hate to even point out this fact to these disenchanted House Democrats but those of us back home in the real world think both the Republicans and Democrats in Washington have done too little for too much for too long.

3 comments:

  1. I can't say that more days in session equates to better government. In fact I think I could make an argument that if they didn't show up at all we would be better off.

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  2. Anybody think we should throw them a bonus for an outstanding performance?

    BTW the salary number is way low. Perks need to be added in. Also we should not forget about kickbacks, over and under the counter.

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  3. Excellent point DeConstructor

    A Cadillac health and benefit package that costs more than I make per year as well as air travel back home each week for each congressman and couple of their staffers. Their health care plan should be changed to the same Obama Care plan they think is good enough for us and their retirement plan the taxpayers fund should be just social security.

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