Hacks in a rush to fatten paychecks and pensions
This latest Beacon Hill pay heist is about two very old guys looking for two very big pensions.
Grumpy old men grabbing obscene money on their way to the dog track.
C’mon down, Senate President Stanley Rosenberg, age 67 as of November, and House Speaker Robert DeLeo, who turns 67 in March.
Under this highway robbery, the salaries of these hack lifers would rise from $102,000 to $175,000. That’s huge right there, but it’s just the appetizer. In the not too distant future, they are both looking at 80 percent pensions based on their three highest-salaried years at the public trough.
Let’s do the math: 73,000 times .80 is 58,400, divided by 12 is 4,860. That’s $4,860 a month on their pensions — extra! On top of what they’d already be grabbing in return for a lifetime of per diems, three-day weekends and full health insurance.
Put another way, if this goes through (and it will, obviously) the monthly kiss in the mail for Rosenberg and DeLeo will rise to $11,600 and change for an annual grab of $140,000.
Perhaps you didn’t realize the hacks were planning to give themselves another pay raise. But how much longer did you expect them to wait?
The last one they got was in December, almost four weeks ago.
The timing for last week’s stickup seemed auspicious — everybody was paying attention to the inauguration and the Pats playoff game.
And so it was dropped on the table — pay raises for the “leaders” of Massachusetts. They had a 2014 report from something called the Special Advisory Commission on Public Official Compensation. Yes, another blue-ribbon commission — Pabst Blue Ribbon.
The chairman is Ira Jackson, another long-in-the tooth career coatholder, age 68, currently the “vice provost for economic planning” at UMass. This guy goes so far back in the hackerama that he worked — wink wink, nudge nudge — for Mayor Kevin White, who departed City Hall under a large cloud in 1983.
In his dotage, Ira’s pay is up to $206,869 a year.
As is their wont, the payroll patriots complain that they need a “living wage.” Their current salary, after last month’s generous hike, is $62,547. That doesn’t include the leadership “stipends” (almost all have phony-baloney titles), their per-diems ($10 to $100 for allegedly driving to work every day), plus an additional $7,200 annually for “expenses.”
In 1998, they pushed a referendum question through a gullible electorate, handing themselves automatic pay hikes based on the state’s median income. Seemed like a no-brainer, until the 2008 recession. Their pay was cut — twice — and the whining started.
Rep. Angelo Scaccia (DReadville) said at the hearing that when he heard about the December pay raise, his wife began planning a vacation, until she found out it was “only” a 4.1 percent increase. Did I mention Angelo is 74?
Under their infinitely malleable ethics rules, the hack solons aren’t supposed to immediately cash in on their own legislation. But there are lots of ways around that, perhaps the most amusing of which would be attaching an “emergency preamble” to the pay raises, making them effective ... well, how does the day before yesterday sound? An emergency preamble on the second legislative pay hike in a month. Fill in your own joke here.