Fossella's Salary vs. Poverty

Seeing how Rep. Vito Fossella and the rest of Congress may not even spend 80 days at their jobs this entire year I wanted to revisit an earlier post on the realities of poverty in the district. Rep. Vito Fossella will make approxiamtely $2,064.63 per day if he works only 80 days this year. After a five day work week, he will have matched the annual income of a consituent in his district who makes minimum wage ($10,700). And now for the post;

While Vito Fossella is off skiing in Vail, Colorado and staying in five star hotels his constituents are busy working to actually support themselves.  Not many may realize he is making $165,170 in salary. If that was not bad enough, he is about to get a pay increase this January that would bring his salary to $168,500.  Curiously some members of Congress think if they can make this much money maybe, just maybe they should increase the minimum wage for the lowest paid workers in America. Unfortunately Rep. Fossella is not one of them.  The current minimum wage by the way is $5.15 per hour, whereas Rep. Fossella's salary breaks down to about $79.40 per hour for a forty hour work week.

Rep. Fossella
Salary: $165,170.00
Per Hour: $79.40

Minimum wage
Salary: $10,700
Per Hour: $5.15

It might be prudent at this point to mention that Rep. Fossella, as with all members of Congress enjoy some of the best health care benefits possible and is guaranteed a pension after retirement.  In fact he keeps that pension even if he goes to jail, as Rep. Cunningham has shown us.  Oh and he gets paid vacation time, if that wasn't evident with all of the time this Congress has been in recess.  For the minimum wage earner to make $10,700 per year they would have to work year round without any time off including federal holidays. As for them getting access to healthcare, well that is another story.

You can read the rest of the article here.

Also recall in a former article we noted that 15.2% of the families on Staten Island make less than $25,000 combined annually. And of the 5.3% make a combined household family income of less than $10,000.

UPDATE I had to remove the table tags in the salary comparison because they were messing up the text flow on the page.