Need a Vacation? Work for Congress

Have you heard the news that Congress has taken off their annual August vacation while leaving work behind that could mean close to a hundred thousand people may not have work till they, and by they I mean Congress, go back to work in September.

This got me thinking about how many days a year Congress takes off.  Not hard to look up.  Last year they were off 23 1/2 weeks.  Now there's only 52 weeks in a year if I remember correctly.  That means they worked 28.5 weeks out of the year.  Well, at least they worked over half the year.  Of course, not by much.  And of course they'll tell you that they don't take all that time off.  They're back home, working the home people, raising money to run, the usual etc and etc.  I don't know about you, but if I wanted to raise money my boss isn't going to let me take time off to go do it.

Last time I looked I worked 49 weeks out of the year.  I got three weeks vacation.  And I don't want to hear how many hours Congress put in recently with the dept ceiling fiasco.  Fifty hours or more weeks are normal for me.  And I bet to a lot of people.  You work what is needed to get the job done.  Not Congress.  They get the big in the news thing done....finally, but take off before they finish everything they should.

And how much money do we pay our esteemed representatives?  The average salary for a rank and file Congressman or woman is $174,000.  Now I don't know about you, but that's a bit more than I bring home in a year.  And they get an annual cost of living raise, automatically.  But they'll stop other jobs from getting a cost of living increase.  My Mom barely makes ends meet on Social Security and guess what?  The last two years she hasn't gotten any cost of living increases.  And I can promise you, her annual income is a lot less than $174,000 a year.

So looking at this I have to ask, who's the sucker here?   The men and women working for us have a pretty sweet deal, while we work our asses off and most of us don't come close to making what they make or getting off the amount of time they do.

(And one of the reasons Congress gets the time off they do is because in the beginning they needed the time to go home and work their farms.  And because before air conditioning Washington DC was brutal in the summer.  But guess what?  How many members of Congress take time off to go home and work the farm?)

But it's not going to stop.  Until we as a people tell Congress that we're tired of them being part time representatives.  I want someone representing me in the Nation's Capital full time.  And everytime they don't vote for a cost of living raise for social security they need to take a pay cut.  Let them try and live on what they want to slash even more so now.

It's just a shame is all.