Folks here is where I believe we can help ourselves. Our elected officials in the legislative branch pose the biggest impact we can have in the direction of the country.
Congress makes it’s own schedule. Since 2001 the average days worked has been 138. Now if you look online as to what they do besides those 138 days you can find things like spending time in their districts. Well I can tell you the two Senators from Ohio seem to have been missing in action. Every day I pass by a headquarters I suppose of (R) Steve Chabot, it has had no activity since before the last election. Our other Senator, (D) Sherrod Brown has been gallivanting around the country looking at the possibility of running for President. He concluded last week it would not be in his best interest.
Other fun facts for Congress. The House of Representatives can have 22 staff members and the Senate has no limit. Staff budgets are based on the population of each state. In 2009 an average of 23 staff members salaries cost us, the citizens of the United States, $1,043,384. So a line in the budget for the entire Congress staff is $558,210,440 million. In 2012 268 of the 535 members of Congress were millionaires. Let’s not forget once you are a member of Congress part of your retirement package is your salary for life. A regular old Senator or Congressman gets $174,000 for life. If you were Speaker of the House you would get $224,000, for life. In 2016 there were 216 retired members of Congress. This line item in the budget of the United States was $37,584,000 million.
Here is my take. In 1947 Congress passed the 22nd Amendment which limits the President to two terms. There needs to be term limits to members of Congress. It has already be proposed by Ted Cruz, my guess it will fall on deaf ears. We can no longer just let our representatives tell us that budget cuts need to fall on us, the citizens. It seems to me that they don’t live as equals to us. They can vote on their own raises, I never have had a job where I could give myself a raise. They have no accountability for any of their actions, in fact they have a $17,000,000 slush fund to pay off their indiscretions. We need to find those folks to represent us who are able to hold themselves accountable financially and personally. If they aren’t able to these things we should be able to as citizens have them fired from their job of representing us. Until next time.