Taxpayers - take back your money!

There was an article in the Washington Post today.

Senate Votes To Privatize Its Failing Restaurants

Year after year, decade upon decade, the U.S. Senate's network of restaurants has lost staggering amounts of money -- more than $18 million since 1993, according to one report, and an estimated $2 million this year alone, according to another.

The financial condition of the world's most exclusive dining hall and its affiliated Capitol Hill restaurants, cafeterias and coffee shops has become so dire that, without a $250,000 subsidy from taxpayers, the Senate won't make payroll next month.

See link for complete article

If I understand this article correctly, we, the American tax payers, have paid $18 million since 1993 to cover the payments to the food service workers, because the restaurants have been run so incompetently that if they'd been "real" restaurants, they would have gone out of business ages ago.

This is interesting:

In a letter to colleagues, Feinstein said that the Government Accountability Office found that "financially breaking even has not been the objective of the current management due to an expectation that the restaurants will operate at a deficit annually."

And, then, of course, this typical thinking:

"I know what happens with privatization. Workers lose jobs, and the next generation of workers make less in wages. These are some of the lowest-paid workers in our country, and I want to help them," Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), a staunch labor union ally, said recently. The wages of the approximately 100 Senate food service workers average $37,000 annually.

Is a $37,000 income "among the lowest in the country"? I'm thinking that there are a lot of people who make a lot lower than that.

And in any even what does it matter? We taxpayers pay enough of our money to politicians to subsidize their lavish life styles without paying even more money to subsidize their food.

And its these people who can't even run a food service properly who want to take over health care? The oil companies?

The US is in sad shape and its only going to get worse until tax payers stand up for their rights. Politicians should not be able to vote themselves raises, still less make them retroactive.