Outside Voices: Lawmakers’ salary increases shouldn’t be automatic

Chicago Tribune, March 26: It used to be that members of Congress had to ask themselves if they deserved a pay raise before giving themselves one.

Wouldn’t you love to have a system like that in your workplace? All in favor of higher wages, raise your hand. Motion carries unanimously! It’s so much more direct than the usual model, with all those troublesome judgments about job performance and payroll targets. The ayes have it. Cha-ching!

That’s how it worked until 1989, when Congress came up with an even better way to reward itself for a job done medium-well. Lawmakers now get automatic cost-of-living increases every year, unless they vote not to take them. No debate, no vote and, if they’re lucky, no public outcry. This year’s $4,700 stealth raise brought congressional salaries to $174,000 a year.

Not everyone in Congress thinks this is the way to do business. Some lawmakers refuse to accept mid-term raises, returning the money to the U.S. Treasury or donating it to charity. Congress opted to forgo the raises several times during the 1990s and again in 2007. Sens. David Vitter, R-La., and Russ Feingold, D-Wis., have repeatedly sponsored measures to do away with automatic increases.

With layoffs, pay cuts and salary freezes running rampant in the real world, the Senate actually passed such a bill last week. Incredibly, House leaders are still resisting.

Calling the bill would almost certainly result in its passage. Lawmakers know that taxpayers aren’t feeling particularly generous these days, and automatic raises are out of step with today’s economic uncertainties. Avoiding a vote, though, would allow House members to duck the heat for their actions, just like they do every year at raise time. Haven’t we had enough of that?

Detroit Free Press, March 20: It would make no sense to lend billions to companies that build cars and trucks while letting the companies that make the parts they put together go under.

So the $5 billion Supplier Support Program recently announced by President Barack Obama is an important safeguard for the federal investment in GM and Chrysler.

But let’s be real here. This is stopgap stuff, intended to prevent a cascade of collapsing companies in an already failing economy. It was urgently needed. It is welcome. It assures short-term stability.

The expectation is that by the end of this month, a plan will be in place to assure that GM and Chrysler make it to the end of the year. But that cannot be the end goal. At some point, the business has to start growing again.

Auto suppliers have been hit particularly hard by the credit drought, since most of them rely on short-term loans to keep operating for the 45-60 days it takes the auto companies to pay for parts delivered. Analysts had said that as many as 500 parts-makers were on the brink of collapse.

Not all of them will survive. The program funnels the federal money through GM and Chrysler, which will decide how it is disbursed and are limited to using it for U.S.-made parts. That, at least, keeps U.S. taxpayers from subsidizing the survival of a foreign factory.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 25: And now for something completely different: a few kind words about Wal-Mart.

Say what you will about it – in the past, we and other critics have said plenty. But the world’s largest corporation is on the side of the angels for at least one crucial issue: health care reform.

Wal-Mart recently announced plans to sell low-cost computers and software to small medical practices. That’s a crucial step to reduce errors and improve quality, but high costs have prevented many independent doctors’ offices from adopting electronic medical records.

Wal-Mart also has quietly begun offering employees a wider array of health plans so that more than half of its employees now are covered, well above the retail industry average. That’s a big switch for a company that was under fire just three years ago for referring workers to publicly funded health programs, such as Medicaid.