unbibium

The News 15 Investigators ran a big scare-and-smear story about how state legislators are abusing perks -- one state senator got $25,000 in "perks" since the beginning of the term. These expenses totaled $2 million for all the legislators, and gave us a lot of "That could pay for 83,000 vaccinations" sort of statistics to touch that extra nerve. They confronted these people, of course, by interviewing them outside about the budget cuts they want to make, and then whipping out their expense account reports.

They conveniently failed to remind us exactly how many legislators that covers, and what their salaries are to begin with, and when their term of office began. I won't have time to look that up until later, but as far as I know, state legislators make mid-five-figures at best, and unless they're already rich, you can expect them to take advantage of perks. And I wonder whether News 15 counted things like paid vacation time and other benefits.

I could understand if they were taking bribes, or taking money illegally. It looks like News 15 is essentially trying to make us outraged that they're overpaid.

Going to their website reveals no new information: only links to archived video and contact information to the legislators involved.

Perhaps this post hit on too obvious a subject. Local TV news sucks, trees are made of wood, and the day is 24 hours long.