Creeva’s World 2.0

Image from here

Today’s e-mail come from one of the peo­ple that sends me polit­i­cal e-mails, I’ll let you read it before I comment.

When a com­pany falls on dif­fi­cult times, one of the things that seems to hap­pen is they reduce their staff and work­ers. The remain­ing work­ers need to find ways to con­tinue to do a good job or risk that their job would be elim­i­nated as well. Wall street, and the media nor­mally con­grat­u­late the CEO for mak­ing this type of “tough deci­sion”, and his board of direc­tors gives him a big bonus.

Our gov­ern­ment should not be immune from sim­i­lar risks.

There­fore: Reduce the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the cur­rent 435 mem­bers to 218 mem­bers and Sen­ate mem­bers from 100 to 50 (one per State). Also reduce remain­ing staff by 25%.

Accom­plish this over the next 8 years. (two steps / two elec­tions) and of course this would require some redistricting.

Some Yearly Mon­e­tary Gains Include:

$44,108,400 for elim­i­na­tion of base pay for con­gress.. (267 mem­bers X $165,200 pay / mem­ber / yr.)

$97,175,000 for elim­i­na­tion of the above people’s staff. (esti­mate $1.3 Mil­lion in staff per each mem­ber of the House, and $3 Mil­lion in staff per each mem­ber of the Sen­ate every year)

$240,294 for the reduc­tion in remain­ing staff by 25%.

$7,500,000,000 reduc­tion in pork bar­rel ear-marks each year. (those mem­bers whose jobs are gone. Cur­rent esti­mates for total gov­ern­ment pork ear­marks are at $15 Bil­lion / yr)

The remain­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tives would need to work smarter and would need to improve effi­cien­cies. It might even be in their best inter­ests to work together for the good of our country?

We may also expect that smaller com­mit­tees might lead to a more effi­cient res­o­lu­tion of issues as well. It might even be eas­ier to keep track of what your rep­re­sen­ta­tive is doing.

Con­gress has more tools avail­able to do their jobs than it had back in 1911 when the cur­rent num­ber of rep­re­sen­ta­tives was estab­lished. (tele­phone, com­put­ers, cell phones to name a few)

Note:
Con­gress did not hes­i­tate to head home when it was a hol­i­day, when the nation needed a real fix to the eco­nomic prob­lems. Also, we have 3 sen­a­tors that have not been doing their jobs for the past 18+ months (on the cam­paign trail) and still they all have been accept­ing full pay. These facts alone sup­port a reduc­tion in sen­a­tors & congress.

Sum­mary of opportunity:

$ 44,108,400 reduc­tion of con­gress members.

$282,100, 000 for elim­i­na­tion of the reduced house mem­ber staff.

$150,000,000 for elim­i­na­tion of reduced sen­ate mem­ber staff.

$59,675,000 for 25% reduc­tion of staff for remain­ing house members.

$37,500,000 for 25% reduc­tion of staff for remain­ing sen­ate members.

$7,500,000,000 reduc­tion in pork added to bills by the reduc­tion of con­gress members.

$8,073,383,400 per year, esti­mated total sav­ings.. (that’s 8-BILLION just to start!)

Big busi­ness does these types of cuts all the time.

If Con­gressper­sons were required to serve 20, 25 or 30 years (like every­one else) in order to col­lect retire­ment ben­e­fits there is no telling how much we would save. Now they get full retire­ment after serv­ing only ONE term.

IF you are happy how the Con­gress spends our taxes, then just delete this mes­sage. IF you are NOT at all happy, then I assume you know what to do.

This is one of the few I get that I can’t refute with a quick view of snopes.   I’m going to trust the num­bers in this case.   While I do believe in smaller gov­ern­ment the changes above are just about the absolute last changes I would make to gov­ern­ment.   I would get rid of most of the gov­ern­ment agen­cies — espe­cially ones where pri­vate busi­ness could do it bet­ter (IRS I’m look at you).  I would have a smaller mil­i­tary and I wouldn’t have them in wars that have no good res­o­lu­tion or just cause for start­ing.   Finally I’m a con­sti­tu­tion­al­ist so that means changes the num­ber of peo­ple in the sen­ate or the house would requite changes to the con­sti­tu­ion — which would require all fifty states to rat­ify.  First good luck on that, sec­ond NO.   The con­sti­tu­tion is just fine, leave it how it is.