This one should make the tea partiers hoppin’ mad.
According to Legistorm.com, two of the most prominent tea party congressional candidates who lost in 2012, Todd Akin and Allen West, dished out huge bonuses to their staffers before heading out the door. Akin topped the House list for average salary paid in 2012, at $121,000.
Though Akin and West in the House routinely called for substantial cuts in federal spending, particularly cutbacks in programs for the poor, they both found it reasonable to double the pay for their staffs. Akin and West were also among those who downplayed the impact of the sequester cuts and the subsequent furloughs -- 20 percent pay cuts that will be suffered by federal workers over a 22-week period.
Legistorm found that Akin, who famously lost a Senate race to Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill, ranked No. 2 on the list of bonus payouts, increasing his staff’s pay by 98.3 percent after he became a lame duck lawmaker.
West, who lost his south Florida seat by a tiny margin, was at No. 4, with an 88.3 percent hike in pay.
In fact, among the Top 10, nine were Republicans. The No. 1 distributor of big, fat bonuses was Democratic congressman Gary Ackerman, who retired at the end of 2012. But Ackerman was always considered an old-fashioned, big-government liberal.
In contrast, congressman Chip Cravaack of Minnesota spent the past two years following the tea party playbook. But when end-of-the-year bonuses were paid out, Cravaack relied upon tax dollars to award 93.3 percent pay raises. That put him at No. 3.
House staffers typically get bonuses at the end of the year depending on how much is left in the office budget, but on average in 2012 those raises were “just” 16.4 percent for Republicans and 15.1 percent for Democrats.
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