It’s not news that States’ budgets are being hammered this year. In Georgia, everyone and their dog who works for the state government is seeing cutbacks and furloughs.
Well, just to make things even, the state legislators have decided to take a furlough day themselves.
I applaud the spirit of the move, but the reality is stupid.
Looking at the Georgia Code on Lexis Nexis, we find that the base salary for a Georgia legislator is $16,000 annually, with an automatic 8% yearly raise. To make things easy, I’m going to assume the $16k even though I know it’s low. There are 180 legislators in Georgia. They are paid monthly, so I feel confident in dividing their salaries by 250 (52 weeks, 5 days a week, minus 10 holidays) to get a total savings to the Georgia Taxpayer of $11,520. To put that in an APR, that is a 0.4% pay cut. My heart isn’t exactly throbbing with passion over this vast budget saving measure.
If they wanted to make a statement, they should have taken a furlough month instead of a day. That would have saved $138,240, or about 3 to 4 school teachers.
Leave a Reply