February 24, 2019
Ocasio-Cortez redistributes her staff’s incomes
By Thomas Lifson
A young woman with no real-world experience is about to learn the hard way that her ideology is impractical. I have to give Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez credit for sincerity in her announcement on Twitter that she plans to compress the pay scale of her staff, reallocating the budget she receives for staff, and cutting the pay at the top, while increasing the pay at the bottom. If she stays in office long enough, the consequences of implementing leftist cant will become clear to her (and us) over time, so it may be a teaching experience†(as former President Obama called it). Stephanie Aiken of Roll Call sympathetically reports:
Claudia Pagon Marchena, like so many Hill staffers, moonlighted at a Washington, D.C., eatery to pay her rent until she took a job with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She celebrated her last day at her coffee shop job that same week.
That’s because Ocasio-Cortez, who has called on fellow lawmakers to pay their staffs a “living wage,†is making an example out of her own office. The New York Democrat has introduced an unusual policy that no one on her staff will make less than $52,000 a year — an almost unheard of amount for many of the 20-somethings whose long hours make House and Senate offices run.
For Pagon Marchena, 22, the pay bump meant an end to a grueling, seven-day-a-week work schedule that was wearing down her resolve to stay in Washington, where rents average more than $2,000 a month.
Congress, which loves spending taxpayers’ money, already is “studying†giving better pay to lower level staff (meaning increasing their own allowances for staff), but Sandy O wants action now (even if impractical) because she’s the boss!
more
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/ocasiocortez_redistributes_her_staffs_incomes.html
