Bill to Ban First Class Flights for Politicans

[Ben]

It will be interesting to see if this one goes through. I recall it's been tried a few times before but failed. When you think about both the cost delta, even at the fed.gov rate, and the general ill will it causes among a good portion of the voting population, I can't believe it's gone on as long as it has. The bill makes an exception for flights over five hours, but at least it would eliminate the more than double cost for short hops.

I will say that as a .gov employee, I have traveled first class, but that was after Bush allowed us to keep our frequent flyer miles (before that they simply went into limbo). So when I was traveling a lot, I would use FF miles to upgrade on all my coast to coast flights. Even when I was just using miles, I would never think to waste the FF miles on something like LA to Denver or Seattle, or other relatively short flights.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/05/13/bill-would-ban-lawmakers-from-flying-first-class-using-taxpayer-dollars/

[KD5NRH]

It will be interesting to see if this one goes through. I recall it's been tried a few times before but failed. When you think about both the cost delta, even at the fed.gov rate, and the general ill will it causes among a good portion of the voting population, I can't believe it's gone on as long as it has. The bill makes an exception for flights over five hours, but at least it would eliminate the more than double cost for short hops.

As if the military isn't flying stuff from damn near everywhere to everywhere else every day.  Those planes have jump seats.  If they want better flights, they can get their home state to pay for it, or pay out of their own pockets.

[Mannlicher]

nice idea, but it's only a sop thrown to us to make us think things are fixable.  I'd rather see a moratorium on Congressional "Junkets".  Those vacations in everything but name only, where CongressKritters take their families and friends to the far flung corners of the world, on 'fact finding' trips.
Bad enough when they are on the tax payer's tab, but even worse, when they allow lobbyists to foot the bill, putting them and their vote in hock.

[Ben]

nice idea, but it's only a sop thrown to us to make us think things are fixable.  I'd rather see a moratorium on Congressional "Junkets".  Those vacations in everything but name only, where CongressKritters take their families and friends to the far flung corners of the world, on 'fact finding' trips.
Bad enough when they are on the tax payer's tab, but even worse, when they allow lobbyists to foot the bill, putting them and their vote in hock.

Govt travel in general, not just that of legislators, needs a good housecleaning. People made a big deal about the GSA travel and conventions a couple of years ago or whenever it was, but that's a drop in the bucket, and GSA is by far not the worst of the bunch, they just became a scapegoat. I have seen it be a pretty common practice that when people have meetings, if eight of them are in DC and there's a field office with two people in Hawaii, the meeting gets held in Hawaii. They started cutting back on that a bit after the GSA thing, but it was going on for years before, and there's still a ton of waste now.

[brimic]

nice idea, but it's only a sop thrown to us to make us think things are fixable.  I'd rather see a moratorium on Congressional "Junkets".  Those vacations in everything but name only, where CongressKritters take their families and friends to the far flung corners of the world, on 'fact finding' trips.
Bad enough when they are on the tax payer's tab, but even worse, when they allow lobbyists to foot the bill, putting them and their vote in hock.

I think it would be a bigger victory to require  them to stand in the rapey grope line like everyone else.

[Sergeant Bob]

nice idea, but it's only a sop thrown to us to make us think things are fixable.  I'd rather see a moratorium on Congressional "Junkets".  Those vacations in everything but name only, where CongressKritters take their families and friends to the far flung corners of the world, on 'fact finding' trips.
Bad enough when they are on the tax payer's tab, but even worse, when they allow lobbyists to foot the bill, putting them and their vote in hock.

When I was in charge of Transient Alert at Howard AFB, Panama, we used to get congressmen in periodically on "Fact Finding Missions", complete with coolers and fishing poles. When the returned, the coolers were considerably heavier and smelled like fish.... I have no idea what "facts" they found.