I think we’re all paying a little too much attention to one comment in an interview. She was discussing her transition to the becoming the youngest member of Congress. Moving, finding a place to live, etc. is all part of her experience during an exciting transition. It’s refreshing to see someone be so open and enthusiastic about government service.
Yes, it’s exciting!!!. I was excited to get my first apartment, too!!! My mom gave me a vacuum cleaner!!!
But what worries me is how an intelligent woman who will be voting on complex economic issues is unsure how to handle her simple personal finances.
She has a solid, large, and absolutely guaranteed* income, and doesn’t know how to handle 3 months rent?
*Unlike the average citizen, she doesn’t have to worry about getting fired, or a getting a bad performance review next month.
For the next 2 years, she will receive the full $348,000— even if she doesn’t clock in on time every morning.
She never said that she didn’t know how to handle her finances. She said that there were issues she is addressing as she transitions to her new job, one of which is that she will be without a salary for three months. Unless you want the country run by old rich people, I think understanding some of the barriers that younger people face in pursuing careers in public service is important. I’ve noticed that there is a tradition of conservatives belittling and intentionally misunderstanding points made by young women, especially young women of color, to keep them in their place. It’s why Fox News always mispronounces Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s name and why there is this pile-on about one comment she made in a longer interview. Her very presence is a threat. We say that we want citizen politicians that better reflect our society, but we often don’t mean it.
Is that a Swiftboat?
Comments like this are why I love this place!
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, the base salary of state legislators in most states is <$25K/year. (In addition to the base salary, most states give their legislators a per diem to cover food and lodging costs during the legislative session.) State legislative sessions typically last a couple of months, which makes it a challenge to hold down most other jobs if you’re serving in a state legislature.
I ran into this roughly a quarter-century ago when I briefly contemplated running for state legislature in Virginia, where I lived at the time. The contemplation was brief because it only lasted until I looked up what Virginia paid its legislators - at the time, it was around $10K. (Now it’s in the upper teens. Whoopee!)
You just can’t get a legislature that looks like the electorate while paying those sorts of salaries. Which means that the interests of people of limited means will be largely overlooked, because most state legislators don’t know what it’s like. The situations that such people face aren’t even on their radar.
Yeah, she’ll be without a salary for 3 months–but she’s got almost lottery-winning-size paychecks coming up. Not such a high barrier.
I just have a little difficulty sympathizing with somebody whose salary is way above average, and tells me how tough it is to relocate for the new job.
It has nothing to do with belittling her gender or color. It’s the left who have been making a huge deal over her sex and color: celebrating with the enthusiasm of born-again evangelicals, and giving her a million times more coverage than any other freshman congressman.
It reminds me of Obama winning the Nobel prize just for sleeping in the White House, before he actually did anything.
All of this attention is based on a single paragraph in a much longer NY Times article about how she is handling her transition, mostly about how she will work with establishment figures in the Democratic Party. The paragraph, which appears towards the end of the article says in full:
She “planned accordingly with her partner,” but people pounced on it. Why?
Because of most people did that we’d die out in a century.
Honestly, the out-of-touch in this thread is driving me crazy. The median household income in the United States is $59,000. That’s household, not personal. Per capita it’s $26,000.
The American public needs to stop trying to define things through the lens of the upper middle class and start realizing that the number of marginalized people with jobs is growing. Stop saying that $174,000 isn’t a lot and realize it’s pretty fucking close to rich in the United States at this point.
If we really want to win elections, we’ll stop screwing around appealing to the well off and begin showing that we can solve problems for the growing middle-class poor. Those folks with decent jobs who nonetheless feel the walls closing in a bit more each year.
If a Representative’s salary is not enough to be able to afford to start a family, then that’s a real problem. Do you really want people with families to be a demographic unrepresented in the halls of the legislature?
Mind you, for the US House itself, I don’t think it actually is a problem, because $174,000 is a lot more than most folks make (and if it is a problem, then we’ve got a lot more people we need to help out more than the congresscritters). But if a state legislature pays less than $20,000 , well, that probably is a problem. And it becomes a problem for the national congress, as well, since the usual path to getting elected to Congress goes through the state legislature or another office at a similar level.
So with her new salary of $174,000, she’ll be making 3X the median household income and almost 7X the median personal income.
In my opinion, it’s poor form for her (or her supporters) to complain about the high cost of rent in the Washington area.
Consideration of your opinion will no doubt feature prominently in her legislative agenda.
Wait. The DC metro area is more expensive than the NYC metro areas (which is where she lives now)? Is she in some rent controlled area or something? Anyway, I don’t see her “complaining” about anything. She’s just noting something about her personal situation. BFD.
174 is a ton of money most places in the country, but not in DC and not in NY.
Maintaining a residence in both locations is more expensive than one residence in either location.
And that is an issue that pretty much all 500 odd Congresscritter have to deal with. A few might have a home district or state close enough to DC to avoid the problem, but most do not.
They all need to have a primary residence in their home district.
It’s certainly not terrible in DC. When my wife and I first moved here 20 years ago, we were making 75K between us, which is the equivalent of about $117,700 now*. And we were able to live quite comfortably on that, bought a house, bought a car that wasn’t used, paid off our old debts, and started putting away savings, all in a year and a half.
The problem, as Fear Itself mentions, is that of maintaining residences in both places. $174K would be awfully tight, I’d expect, to be able to maintain residences both in NYC and DC. They really ought to take one of the parking lots near the Capitol, and build an apartment building for Congresspersons who didn’t want to buy or rent a house down here.
*The inflation calculators I could find only went up to 2017, so I assumed 2% inflation over the past year.
Of course, in most districts, the cost of living is a wee bit less than NYC.
Do you think this post is actually responsive to anything she actually said?