From the article:

For the fifth straight year, members of Congress will see a jump in their paychecks in 2004, with election-year salaries rising from the current $154,700 to about $158,000.

The Senate, on a 60-34 vote Thursday, rejected a proposal to exempt senators from a cost-of-living increase going to all civilian federal workers and military personnel. Last month the House, by a similar convincing margin, also turned back an attempt to deny lawmakers an automatic share of the COLA increase.

As in past years, the effort to deny senators their pay raise was led by Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., who has a policy of returning to the Treasury any pay he receives that is above his salary when he began his six-year term.

"How can Congress give itself a $3,400 pay raise while nearly 9 million people are unemployed, and 2 million have been out of work for more than half a year," Feingold asked.

With the latest increase, he said, members will have received five consecutive pay hikes totaling more than $21,000.

The pay raise takes effect because of the COLA law, or cost of living adjustment. All federal employees receive yearly raises based on a formula created by law makers which takes into effect inflation and other details. The post office has a COLA regulation as does social security. Its a law that makes sense and allows payments to be kept in line with the changing times.

Lets take a look at the $3,400.00 pay raise these congressmen are receiving. There are 100 Senators and 435 Representatives in congress. That's a total of 535 congressment receiving a raise. That raise works out to about 1.81 million dollars in raises for congressment this year. Use that formula for the last 5 years and you get approximatley 11.24 million dollars in raises. That's quite the chunk of change.

As is normal, our federal legislature is not using common sense when applying COLA to themselves. A sensible person would look at the type of individuals in congress and determine that they don't need a raise. These men and women, for the most part, do not live off of their congressional salaries. Rather they have a significant amount of income from their lives prior to serving in the legislature. For them to vote themselves nearly 2 million dollars in raises every year is totally non-sensical.

Common sense has never been a large part of our congressmen and women. It looks like it isn't going to change any time soon.