Editorial: A budget failure doesn't earn a pay raise

For most people, getting a raise is not a given. It is also a process.

You have a performance evaluation. Your whole scope of work over the last year is reviewed. Did you meet expectations? Did you exceed them? What were your strengths? Did you work well with your team? Did you take critiques well?

And even when all of that has been scored and tallied and boiled down to a dot on a graph, it still isn’t a guarantee. A company cannot offer money it doesn’t have. A manager cannot approve a raise he hasn’t been authorized to give.

Unless, of course, you are a Pennsylvania legislator or other member of state government whose annual increases are automatically tied to cost-of-living numbers.

The Keystone State has the third highest paid legislators in the country. The new increase, effective Dec. 1, is 3.25%. For your average Pennsylvania lawmaker, that translates to $113,575. Some leadership positions make more. But the national average is just $47,904, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Yes, Gov. Josh Shapiro’s salary is even more. It is now $253,747, second only to New York. But power to control these paychecks only gets signed off in the governor’s office. It is passed in the General Assembly.

There is no performance evaluation. There is no metric. There is no score of how expectations were met or exceeded. December rolls around and the increase just happens.

It is lucky for the lawmakers that no one measures the job done. That only happens in election years, a time when keeping the job with the automatic pay raise becomes so important. But in an off year like 2025, well, there is plenty of time for people to forget.

Or is there? This year was a dramatic example of the legislators missing the target on their most important job. They eventually passed a budget, but that came months after the June 30 deadline. That date, by the way, is enshrined in law but doesn’t seem to be one elected officials can hit with the same accuracy as their pay raise.

Maybe that’s because the budget requires work. The pay increase requires shrugs and inaction.

There are those who think that’s wrong. PennLive noted state Rep. Russ Diamond, R-Lebanon, has been vocal about eliminating the cost-of-living adjustments, introducing a bill to that effect each session. That’s unsurprising as he came into office in 2015 after years of railing against the pay increase lawmakers approved in the dark of night in July 2005.

This year, the raise is not just wrong. It’s offensive.

There are people in this state who suffered because of four months of the failure of their elected officials. There are people who lost jobs — some temporarily and some permanently. There are people who went hungry and people who starved for interaction in shuttered senior centers as programs closed.

And there are taxpayers who are still on the hook for loans taken out by school districts, municipalities and counties that had to find money to make do.

This is inexcusable. And what is worse, there has been plenty of time for lawmakers to put the brakes on the pay raise. They could have stopped it. Even if they didn’t eliminate it permanently, they could have done what they did in 2020 and frozen it.

This year was not a pandemic caused by an invisible virus. This year was a sickness of the government’s making, and it was within the government’s power to mitigate it. Pennsylvania chose not to do that.

The cost-of-living adjustment is a perpetual motion machine of unfair action and poor decision making. It needs to be turned off.