Karen Bass, Assembly Speaker, Approves Huge Raises to Staff in Cash Strapped Economy

As a review of the past week's "bad judgment" example by an elected state legislator, I bring to you Karen Bass, Assembly Speaker. Karen Bass is the successor to Fabian Nunez as assembly speaker who was termed out of office last fall after living a lavish life on other people's money during the time he was supposed to have "our" best interests at heart. Nunez's son was recently indicted for the stabbing murder in October of a San Diego student while the younger Nunez was visiting the area with friends from Sacramento. They are also charged with the murder.

But that's all another story and Karen Bass has another kind of problem. Bass really stepped into a big pile of her own doing by approving over half a billion dollars in pay raises to 136 staff members. Bass maybe had a mental blackout for that period of time, enough cause her to forget that the State is a bit short on cash, while it furloughed workers and has approved the largest tax increase in the history of California- and presenting more taxes for approval to the voters on the May 19th election.

The L.A. Times, in case you missed it, captures the lurid details of a cash grab. The story presents us with the inescapable conclusion that the elected officials believe that they are ruled by some other form of laws than the rest of us, and that they are ENTITLED to raises, large ones, no matter what financial chaos the rest of the state or the world is experiencing. "State Assembly leaders hand out staff raises; Speaker Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles) and minority leader Michael Villines (R-Clovis) give 136 staffers increases totaling $551,000," By Patrick McGreevy, April 22, 2009 Los Angeles Times. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-govt-payraise22-2009apr22,0,3407994.story Mike Villines, Republican minority leader was right up there with Bass in making what surely would qualify as a "politically incorrect" move if ever there was one.

Bass, besides approving the raises, made some idiotic comments besides by which she tried to justify the raises.

Bass said the raises would be more than offset by a $15-million reduction
in the Assembly's operating budget that included the elimination of 20
jobs.

"I'm trying to streamline my operations," Bass said. "That allows me to
give a 5% raise to staff who haven't had a raise in three years."

This is one of those situations where, when somebody who finds themeself in a hole, needs to stop digging. By her very statement, she acknowledges losses of jobs. I don't need to make any analogies at this point, but the situation is ripe for some. Mike Villines did not want to be left out of the "Let's make a stupid statement" competition as the L.A. Times story reports more,

Villines similarly said the raises would be paid for by "significant spending reductions to our budget."

In this case, the inability on the part of LEADERS of the legislature to grasp the hypocrisy while displaying utterly selfish greed at taxpayer expense makes this action all the more outrageous. If they are unable to see the picture in front of their face, what other things are they fouling up? And maybe they aren't "lying" about the reasons for the raises, but lying would probably have made them look less absurd in the positions taken on the matter.

The story was the beginning of the escapade into financially irresponsible behavior. Like many talk show hosts come to realize in reporting on politics and the unbelievable things that people do, "You can't make this stuff up." The next part of this story comes almost immediately in some very lame attempt to make stupid moves sound reasonable. Standby for part 2.