Dem Pols Want $36,000 Raise and 10 Cent Fee for Plastic Bags
http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/262024/dem-pols-want-36000-raise-and-10-cent-fee-plastic-daniel-greenfieldMay 5, 2016
Daniel Greenfield
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Democrat politicians concerned about social justice care about you. Deeply and truly. Take Margaret Chin, a Democratic City Council member in New York, who has one great mission in her spotty dirty career (besides carrying water for all sorts of real estate interests), making working families pay 10 cents for every plastic shopping bag.
Also she wants a $36,000 raise.
New York City council members, which these days means assorted radicals backed by ACORN and corrupt business interests, were getting paid $112,000 a year to run the city into the ground. But it just wasn't enough.
Schwarz chaired the outside panel that recommended a 23 percent raise for council members, to $138,315.
The council promptly turned around and tacked on another $10,185, for a 32 percent bump — and is rushing the vote through on Friday.
At Wednesday’s required-by-law hearing, Councilmember Margaret Chin (D-Lower Manhattan) claimed the higher number would attract “more good people to government.”
So was Margaret Chin arguing that going to $138K would attract someone better than her?
Chinatown already hates Chin. She sold them out with the Peter Liang case. And they certainly aren't going to benefit from a 10 cent bag tax. But Democrats answer to a political machine, not to voters.
Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez (D-Upper Manhattan) had the gall to say, “We have the right to make a living to support our family” — and “our salaries should be $175,000.”
Rodriguez is another sponsor of the ten cent a bag tax. Ydanis Rodriguez wants New Yorkers to have to pay ten cents a bag and to pay him $175,000.
Median household income in Rodriguez’s district is $36,000.
It'll be even less if he has his way. What does Ydanis Rodriguez do to deserve $175K? He has a BA in Political Science from CUNY. That should answer your question.
Rodriguez said he understands issues faced by "the 99 percent," but that his duties are complex and easily on par with executives running large organizations.
Ydanis Rodriguez was an Occupy Wall Street protester. And a government 1 percenter.
Despite his passion about the issue of raises, Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez did not stay for all of the four-hour hearing.
If only we had paid him $175K, he would have stayed.
Chinatown Councilwoman Margaret Chin said, "the way I look at this job, I have many full time jobs. This is more than full-time."
The only thing Chin ever appears to have done is work at community groups. She has no concept of what a job, full-time or part-time is. Or what life is like for working people.
Two of East New York Councilwoman Inez Barron's aides attended in their "personal capacity" to call for raises for staffers. Barron's chief of staff Joy Simmons also stated that Councilmembers and staffers had enough work to do without responding to residents' myriad complaints and recommended that in addition to getting more money, they "should get out of the business of dealing with constituent services."
And then maybe New Yorkers should "get out of the business" of paying this gang of parasites to tax them. I mean this is dangerously close to Brecht's Electing a New People. The City Council can get out of the business of "constituent services" and just focus on the important stuff. Stealing from the people without even attempting to provide any kind of return.
"We actually have multiple members who stayed for the entire hearing.That is incredibly rare"
Just think how often it would happen if they got a $36,000 raise every time they stayed.
Brad Lander, a left-wing politician as obsessed with taxing working families for shopping as Chin, defended the $36,000 raise by saying, "If you want a well-governed city, the package of good-government reforms and pay increases we are voting on this week is the right way to go."
We don't have a well-governed city. How is rewarding predatory parasites with more money who are the whole problem supposed to get us one?
Are we supposed to be shoving tens of thousands of dollars into Brad Lander's pockets so he can tax working families every time they go shopping? Isn't that like the torture fee in Brazil?
The resulting salary of $148,500 for City Council members is reasonable. For comparison, city commissioners generally make $205,000 and deputy commissioners $192,000. Los Angeles City Council members’ salaries exceed $180,000.
Note, that $148K is well above what we were talking about before.
Anyway, as part of the price of "good government", Margaret Chin was funneling taxpayer money to a left-wing group lobbying for a ten cent bag tax hike. Typical tactics involved driving kids to protest against "big plastic" without telling them what it would cost their parents.
City Councilwoman Margaret Chin funneled $10,000 in taxpayer cash to a registered lobbyist who promoted her green bill to place fees on plastic bags — but failed to report the expense, as required by law, records show.
Chin, a Manhattan Democrat, paid $5,000 in fiscal years 2015 and 2016 to the Citizens Committee for New York City to “provide for reusable bag giveaways and outreach events about the environmental impacts of single-use [bags],” council-budget records state.
The advocacy group, listed in state records as lobbying for Chin’s “plastic bag bill,” included fliers with the bags calling for recipients to “call or e-mail your council member” about the legislation.
Good government. This is what it looks like. If only paid these people a modest $180K, just like California, most of them would already be in jail, just like California.
Final fun fact, Brad Lander and Margaret Chin's ten cent bag tax on working families has many of the same supporters as the resolution in support of the Stalinist atom bomb traitors.
Brad Lander, Daniel Dromm, Rosie Mendez, Helen Rosenthal, Andrew Cohen, Ritchie Torres, Mark Levine, Donovan Richards, Corey Johnson, Carlos Menchaca and of course, Margaret Chin.
If only we paid the City Council members $200K, maybe they wouldn't betray their country and their constituents.
