I wonder if this applies to the United Kingdom?
All
those 789 members of the House of Lords can get £300.00 per sitting
just for turning up. That's about £60k per year + perks and a thumping
good pension too!
Here’s how government really works. The insiders get richer; the outsiders get poorer. The New York Times has the story:
WASHINGTON
— When Representative Ed Pastor was first elected to Congress two
decades ago, he was comfortably ensconced in the middle class. Mr.
Pastor, a Democrat from Arizona, held $100,000 or so in savings accounts
in the mid-1990s and had a retirement pension, but like many Americans,
he also owed the banks nearly as much in loans. Today, Mr. Pastor, a
miner’s son and a former high school teacher, is a member of a
not-so-exclusive club: Capitol Hill millionaires. That group has grown
in recent years to include nearly half of all members of Congress — 250
in all — and the wealth gap between lawmakers and their constituents
appears to be growing quickly, even as Congress debates unemployment
benefits, possible cuts in food stamps and a “millionaire’s tax.”
Mr.
Pastor buys a Powerball lottery ticket every weekend and says he does
not consider himself rich. Indeed, within the halls of Congress, where
the median net worth is $913,000 and climbing, he is not. He is a
rank-and-file millionaire. But compared with the country at large, where
the median net worth is $100,000 and has dropped significantly since
2004, he and most of his fellow lawmakers are true aristocrats.
Largely
insulated from the country’s economic downturn since 2008, members of
Congress — many of them among the “1 percenters” denounced by Occupy
Wall Street protesters — have gotten much richer even as most of the
country has become much poorer in the last six years, according to an
analysis by The New York Times based on data from the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit research group.
*Source: The New York Times
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