NEOAVATARA

Congress has an amazing ability to ignore common sense and rationality.

Today comes news that Congress, who opposed retention bonuses for virtually anyone in the private sector (of course, especially those that received federal funds in form of bailouts) has now provided huge amounts of bonuses to staffers…in the form of retention benefits.

A month after they voted to punish some corporate executives for taking hefty bonus payouts, members of the House of Representatives quietly gave their own staffers a new potential bonus by making even their top-earning aides eligible for taxpayer dollars to repay their student loans.

The change, which took effect in May, means House employees earning up to $168,411, or the top level, are now eligible for government-funded subsidies to help pay down their student loans.

I would support this, except for the gross hypocrisy.  It is natural to pay people what they are worth.  Who dictates what people are worth?  The marketplace.  And Congress is admitting the fact.

Now some may argue that there is a difference, because AIG, Citibank and others received bailouts from the taxpayers, and thus fit under a different standard.  Um, hello…this is a federal government that now will have a $9 trillion deficit over the next decade.  Who do you think is going to bail them out…other than the taxpayer?

There is NO difference.

But what else should we expect.  These are the same people that decried that automaker CEOs took private planes to Washington to plead for bailouts.  Of course, that didn’t hamper Nancy Pelosi herself from trying to propose that Congres be able to spend hundreds of millions of dollars for private planes for those same Congressman.  Hypocrisy.

Or the fact that Congressmen were the ones who mandated that banks give more loans to subprime individuals that had questionable ability to pay those mortgages…and are now lecturing us about the idiocy of giving subprime loans.  Or people that were in charge of regulatory practices for the better part of a decade, and now complain those regulations are broken, and they themselves are going to fix it.   Yeah, right.

Or the hypocrisy of demanding a public option in healthcare, which the CBO itself states will drive millions into that plan because employers will withdraw their private plans.  Yet, members of Congress are unwilling to accept the plan as their default package.  Or people from Barack Obama on down that refuse to place their own families in the hands of the federal government’s health care system.  Hypocrisy.

Democrats in Congress obviously either think we are not paying attention, or simply think we are too dumb to realize what is going on.