Why doesn’t she just pay for it?
Regards,
Shodan
Then I don’t understand her point at all. Imagine a person making $25k per year who finds out that in two months he or she will be making $174k per year, however, there will be $5k to $10k of expenses for those two months.
I dare say that everyone in the United States in that situation could handle such a thing and would positively welcome it. The implication is that there needs to be yet another government solution for this “problem” or else poor and lower middle class people will not be able to run for Congress.
You sure showed her, with a burn like that she’ll never be elected!
Why wouldn’t on of her Dem colleagues like Maxine Waters not let her crash on her couch for a month?
Because she has already she has a plan to cover her living expenses until her congressional salary kicks in.
Where was FOX news to mock elected republicans who have made similar complaints in the past?
Good question, Jason Chaffetz said that poor people couldn’t afford health insurance because they spent their money on the latest iPhone. Later he complained that he couldn’t afford to rent a place in dc on his salary. I’m sure Fox News excoriated him.
You have to be fucking kidding me. Can’t scrape up a few thousand somewhere? This is ridiculous.
Nope. Not at all. Most Americans have no savings, and that’s even more likely when your income is low. And low income people tend to have bad credit because they have to be rather loose with due dates just to make ends meet.
This is a genuine barrier. It’s not something that would ever happen in another job, as the employer, if they want you that bad, would give you advance to help you with expenses.
Granted, it’s a smaller barrier than the amount of money you have to raise to even run, which is mostly what keeps out the poor people. But it is a barrier.
This.
And I say that as someone who is anti-Socialist and would likely vote for most people ahead of Cortez on that basis.
I think that you have very little idea of what someone who doesn’t make a lot of money can and cannot handle (easily or not) as far as sudden or unexpected expenses.
As BigT states, most Americans (especially those who are in lower income brackets) have little or nothing in the way of savings. 69% of Americans have under $1000 in their savings accounts, with 34% having no savings at all.
This is remarkably obtuse. Being elected to federal office is not merely taking a job out of state. She is talking about ordinary people being able to participate at the highest levels of American democracy, not getting a better welding job. If you are annoyed with all those fat cats in Washington making all the decisions then this is a very different issue than general labour mobility.
I mean, sure this is a bit of a stunt. There’s probably a tonne of informal ways to make it happen and it sounds like she is already employing them. But some people deciding whether to run for office don’t know they exist. Someone running independent probably would hve little access to them.
In fact I cannot, other than new grad interns who are being supported by parents, imagine another employer telling an onboarding employee to move to a new town and live there for three months doing required prepping for the job without any salary.
I daresay that most people who have been making $25K/year could NOT easily swing their current expenses plus another $10K in expenses for three months with no income over that period.
And I say that as someone who thinks that her statement is a bit disingenuous as she was able to solve the problem without much difficulty.
If my private employer was able to pay for cross-country relocation and two months of temporary housing when I signed on, you would think the U.S. Government could do the same for a member of Congress. I’m fortunate enough to be in an industry where skilled workers are in high demand right now, but I’m also not remotely in any kind of leadership position.
I haven’t been keeping track of her biographical details. But I assumed that, even if she doesn’t have a family right now, she probably intends to start one in the not-too-distant future (on the grounds that most people want to start families).
I was also trying to make as conservative an estimate as I could, because I expect that even a family dwelling in New York plus an apartment in DC would still add up to much less than her new salary.
Alternately, I could have asked what her current salary is, on which she is apparently capable of maintaining a New York residence that meets her needs (whatever those needs are). If her current salary is less than $144,000 (i.e., less than her new salary by at least $30,000 , the cost madmonk28 quoted for a DC apartment), then she should be able to absorb the greater cost of living.
Doesn’t sound very climactic considering there are MILLIONS homeless in the US who will never have a chance… She thought she had no chance, so she threw a “Ban ICE” and then that phony Gilibrand noticed it helped her win, and so she said it… The Democratic Party has never been further to the right, and they wonder why they lost an election despite all the things you can say about Trump, including the things he said…
Especially when the new employer says, “By the way, it’s a condition of this job offer that you maintain residence in your old state.”
How many private employers do that?
Here’s a novel idea. Why doesn’t she wait to start a family until she can afford to do so?
There was a time, gentlemen argued these points like gentlemen. Gentlemen who saw the clear and obvious truth that landlords and businessmen…persons of substance!..were clearly the only possible leaders for a new nation, born in glorious Revolution, devoted to liberty and equality. Sorta kinda.
The notion of being a Representative for a salary, like a common bootlick or codswallopper…well, that just wouldn’t do! Or a Senator?! Pearls clutched, lights out. But such rules would put any serious political power beyond the reach of any of the common folk! They blinked, and waited for the punch line.
Well, they had “skin in the game”, didn’t they? Men of substance could be relied upon to forgo the temptations of bribery and connivance, being immune to the cunning avarice of the peasant. That part didn’t work out so well, as it turned out.
And so it goes. Still goes, but not so much.
Perhaps with a bit of work, your novel idea could be a modest proposal?
I don’t know if there is anything to do about it, but the idea that public service pays not very much is a real barrier to those with talent and ability who would do so, but choose not to because they can’t afford it.
If an otherwise excellent potential public servant can make $300K in the private sector, without all the hassle of elected office, it’s hard to see why they would want to take the giant pay cut.