Oil workers given a place to sleep IS housing at the employer’s expense. I’ll admit I don’t know about crash pads. Do flight attendants maintain a primary residence and then receive no housing allowance while in some other city? My airline pilot friend told me that he gets money for a hotel when he’s away from home.
I believe the only difference between a member of Congress’ FERS is a slight difference the rate at which the pension is calculated. To reach 80% of their salary, by my back of the envelope math, that member would have to serve in Congress for 46 years.
I don’t know what Investopedia is, but I think based on that article they seem not as interested in facts as they are in scoring a point on politicians.
I am hard pressed to call anyone in congress “quality people”. Seriously. There is absolutely nothing about the job that ensures we only get the best quality people taking it. Far from it and that holds for the right and left.
I have some suggestions for which neighborhood it should be in.
Thanks, but I still am not clear what role crash pads play. See for example in the article, “Flight attendants may sleep in secret hideaways during long flights, and they usually stay in hotels during multi-day trips. But what happens between their shifts is truly fascinating.”
Do flight attendants have a home/apartment in one city, stay in hotels during work trips, and then stay in crash pads when they, uh, aren’t at home and aren’t on work travel? Or, do they stay in hotels while on work travel, and the crash pads ARE their homes, even though they aren’t luxury apartments? By the latter definition, an awful lot of young DC government workers live in a slight variation of these crash pads.
I assume “very good at public speaking” was intended to reflect some better-than-average talent.
I think those numbers are bogus. US News has some very different numbers that are more in line with reality, IME. (I’m very well acquainted with quite a lot of lawyers IRL (friends, relatives etc.), and I’d be very surprised if a single one of them is making less than $150K.)
I’m not comfortable with the “using to” summation of my point. There are more ways to be creepy and to harass someone than by pushing them down onto a bed. Usually one might leer or proposition or fondle a person rather than go straight to the bed step of unwanted sexual advances. The question isn’t whether the bed is being used for sex or in unwanted sexual advances. It’s whether its presence puts people into a state of mind that makes them misbehave in a more general sense.
But, ignoring that, I would assume that there is not. You would need to anonymously survey the people working in Congress (both the legislators and their staff) to ask them things like “Have you thought about having sex with a person you work with in the last 30 days?” and “Have you experienced unwanted attention or been propositioned for sexual activities in the last 30 days?” and then run a control group where you ask everyone to stop living in their offices for several months, and rerun those same surveys.
I find it unlikely that such a study has taken place.
But, presumably, the people involved know whether or not they’ve ever put 2 and 2 together, when looking at someone, and thought to themselves that the bed is just right there.
ISTM if a congressman (or woman) wanted to get up to some hanky-panky, particularly with someone they should not be with, they won’t be doing it in their office.
Totally, because that would be mind-bogglingly stupid, and if there’s one phrase that doesn’t describe politicians having affairs, it’s mind-bogglingly stupid.
I don’t think we have the data to opine. It’s really on them (the legislators), as the people who might have sense of the reality of the question, to decide.
Though, there may be one way of determining, which would be to compare harassment rates in Congress to your average corporation. That wouldn’t tell you that it was about the beds, but it would at least tell us whether it was worth trying different things and seeing if the spaghetti sticks to the wall.
I largely agree with this, and also think the people who should be running this country* should be able to procure living arrangement more dignified than college freshmen pledging a fraternity.
I really feel that if they make the complaint that they just are not able to make it on such a paltry salary, they really have no idea what it’s like to make hard choices. This explains why they are unable to compromise as they are used to getting everything that they want.
If your idea of an important opportunity cost decision is whether you should vacation 2 weeks in the hamptons, or 1 week in the south of france, then you don’t know what it is like to make choices where the opportunity tradeoffs are actually things that you need.
Knowing what it is like to give things up that you really wanted, or even thought you needed, in order to achieve the things that you really need to survive another day is a skill that seems utterly lacking in congress.
Yeah, they may be smart and driven, but they are handicapped by their entitled attitude, and no ambition can cure that.
Isn’t this where the discussion lies? If you’re using your office as your residence, there will always be certain things that you won’t want your coworkers exposed to. Things on the spectrum between clipping your toenails and bringing home one night stands from the bar. And while most reasonable people would take exceptional care not to expose other people in the office to these things, when you get a group of 535 people, there will be a few that won’t take that care…whether it’s through obliviousness or malice. When those 535 people are congresspeople, maybe a few more than you’d expect.
I frankly don’t see why there’s some assumption in this thread that the people sleeping in their office are doing it because of their “paltry salary”. Sure, some may be trying to save a buck but they probably know they could afford something cheap at least. Very few Congresspeople want to go on record asking for a raise. Isn’t it more reasonable to assume that most of these people are doing it as a political stunt or because they are cheapskates? I mean, if it’s affordability, why is it only men and lopsidedly Republican?
It was noted earlier that largely the ones sleeping in their office are republicans.
I think it is more likely republicans do not want to be in an apartment complex where the riff-raff might start asking hard questions or giving them shit. I can guarantee if (as an example) Paul Ryan lived in my building I’d have some words with him every chance I got. I am pretty sure I wouldn’t be the only one and I am pretty sure Ryan would want to avoid that if at all possible.
I think that’s completely ridiculous, and based on a caricatured view of Republicans as a bunch of fat cat rich guys who avoid all contact with members of the “underclass”.
The most likely reason for the skew is the opposite - it’s the Republican appeal to anti-government populist types, who want to see their representatives as hard-working plain-living thrifty regular guys. Sleeping in the office plays to that image.
Which is not to say that finances are not also a big part of it. But once it got established in Republican circles for the above reason, then it’s more likely to be adopted by other Republicans, than by Democrats in similar financial circumstances.
