I’d even like to see Congress (and other federal employees on down the line) keep a percentage of any savings when spending comes in under the previous year, then we’d really see some cost cutting–and we wouldn’t have ridiculous cases of $100M corruption over a $100k bribe campaign contribution.

As to the man: he should resign. Conservatives should be crying for his resignation from rooftops everywhere. I repeat: what hypocrisy.

You were asleep in Civics class, so let me give you a head’s up: Nobody can make a politician resign if s/he doesn’t want to go, isn’t recalled by the electorate, and can’t be legally removed. The GOP tried to dump Larry Craig, but he wouldn’t leave, and finally he dumped himself. Vitter replaced Bob Livingston, who was in line to become Speaker of the House but resigned after his extramarital affair was revealed for Larry Flynt cash. After drunk-driving off a bridge and leaving a young woman to drown in his car, Ted Kennedy was pressured to resign by the Dems … psych!

(If that guy’s going to be a British Knight, I say we trump it by starting a movement to beatify Mary Jo Kopechne. But I digress…)

Would I rather someone else be representative of my values than a confessed whoremonger? Of course. Am I going to throw away a good idea because he was the source of it if nobody else is going to step up to the plate? Of course NOT.

Congressional salaries are a drop in the bucket, no matter how big the budget is. We need competent servants, not partisan hacks who only pursue politics to augment their stature. Free market, self-interest guy that I am, I think it would be more than reasonable to give people an economic incentive to pursue politics. 90% of kids out of top colleges want that big money and would be crazy to pursue a career as a legislator. It’s amazing to me that congressional salaries total less than a hundred million dollars. Shouldn’t the body that’s entrusted with allocating a budget of $3 trillion (last year) be paid at least a billion?

Are you suggesting “kids out of college” would be more likely to be “competent servants” and not “partisan hacks”? What’s your point of reference for such an opinion? And you’re acting as if the POWER that money follows is not incentive enough for those greedy grads.

Your self-description as a “free-market guy” is betrayed by your argument, which sounds like those of teachers’ unions who say people who would be the best teachers go into private enterprise because teachers’ pay is so low. The reason the pay is relatively paltry is simple: When you are excellent and do a great job in private industry, your services are at a premium because more money comes in due to your performance. That’s free market. OTOH, salaries for public schools come from budgets that are finite. That’s government.

Does more money come into a school district when the teachers are better? Nope. Does less money come in when the teachers suck? Nope — in fact, the argument is often made that the more a school district sucks, the more money should be shoveled into it. Can you reward better teachers for their excellence? Nope – the union don’t play that. Can you fire teachers who suck without an arcane, Olympian legal struggle? Nope. Will any of those things change if the teachers are paid better? Why would they?

Vitter is being smarter than he was when he hooked up with hookers. He’s holding a mirror to the hypocrites sliming bonuses for driving businesses into the ground and saying “You’re raising your salaries while raising taxes, simultaneously saying ‘We all have to sacrifice … including me.’ So let’s pay up.”

One last thing: The submortgage crisis that spurred the recession should have taught us all about “drops in the bucket”: What water there is in the bucket is made up of drops too numerous to count, but when everyone wastes drops without counting, eventually the bucket will be emptied.

If only his colleagues (and right-wing bloggers) were so principled.

If you Googled the quotation, you’d discover it was a principled right-wing blogger who wrote it.

And yeah, no way someone would know what was happening in their basement. If Frank is that clueless, you might expect him to be that clueless about banks and mortgages…

Pay raises for me, but not for Thee
……

Speaking of hypocrisy – are you also demanding Barney Frank resign?

I love Barney. I believe that he had no knowledge that his boyfriend was running an escort service out of his apartment because that was the only time you ever heard a story like that out of him. Senator Vitter on the other hand…