All money paid to South Carolina lawmakers while they aren’t in session has been stopped by the state Supreme Court as the justices sort through a lawsuit from one of their members, alleging legislators improperly gave themselves an $18,000-a-year raise.
The raise is what is called “in-district compensation” — money set aside for legislative duties that has few limits on how it can be spent and requires no receipts or other documentation.
Lawmakers voted, in the budget set to start July 1, to increase it from $1,000 a month to $2,500 a month for all 46 senators and 124 House members.
Republican Sen. Wes Climer sued his colleagues, saying the raise violates the state constitution, which bans the legislature from increasing their per diem during their terms. House members would get 18 months of the extra money and senators would get more than three years of payments before facing reelection.
Take your time deliberating.
Unpopular opinion, but American politicians are pay extremely low.
It’s stupidly low. It opens our government up to being bought very easily.
As someone who has casually considered running for office in South Carolina (because our local representative is an incompetent buffoon, and while I don’t consider myself qualified to run, I know I could do a better job), I kinda agree. If you want your representatives to be normal people, and understand what reality is like, then you really need to pay them at least a somewhat liveable wage, because as it stands, the only people who can afford to do the job are those who are basically independently wealthy, own a car dealership or some other business that basically runs itself, or are retired. I’m not saying politicians should be making boatloads of money. But their pay should also be a liveable wage for the area they represent.
They are. As weird as that is to say. It very much contributes, though I would not say causes, the massive unprecedented levels of corruption we see today.
Cuba pays their politicians very low, and expects them to make money doing a regular job, to discourage corruption, and keep politicians in touch with their constituency’s needs.
Cuba dosen’t have a private sector trying to manipulate government officials to change policy in their favor.
I wonder why? 🤔
And judging by how effective they are, they are overpaid.
They shouldn’t have to hustle around trying to secure funding for re-election campaigns. Incumbents and new candidates should be given a budget by the government. Campaign donations shouldn’t be allowed at all. Third party campaigning shouldn’t be allowed. IDK where the line is that protects freedom of speech while prohibiting third party campaigning but there needs to be one.
The line shouldn’t be “no third parties”. I think it should be closer to “recieve x% of the votes in the last election or y number of signatures and recieve $z for use on your campaign”.
This would weed out people from starting a campaign just for the money while allowing third parties to have an even-ish playing field at least in this regard.
When I say third party campaigning i mean campaigning done by an outside group, that’s not affiliated with the candidate’s official campaign.
I’m not referring to candidate eligibility
People downvoting because they don’t how realise how the politicians got so rich.
Do you have any comparative data on their salaries vs other countries?
Holy mackerel! A Republican actually doing what the party talks about, that’s a miracle. Can he run for President?
