#ncga: Pay raises for Speaker Moore’s staff. A gas tax hike for US.
The drive-bys gave us a peek at the salaries of all of new House speaker Tim Moore’s staff. Most staffers got raises in the ballpark of twenty percent. One aide – who had been working on Jones Street since 2012 — got a nearly 31 percent increase. Another aide got bumped from a little over $100,000 to a paltry $120,000.
Moore — just like his predecessor Thom Tillis — has a total payroll in the speaker’s office just under $1 
million. That’s for a dozen employees of a legislative body that doesn’t meet year-round.
Meanwhile, the state Senate has passed a gas tax hike meant to finance all kinds of road construction — since, you know, we don’t have any money to spare for important stuff like road construction. The drivebys have also figured that — if the bill that recently passed the Senate was already law — we’d be currently blessed with the 2nd highest gas tax in the nation. This dog of a bill is now in the collective lap of the state House.
Also on the radar for the legislature is $45 million in new corporate welfare goodies, plus big tax breaks for airlines and data centers.
¡ viva la revolución conservadora
And we don’t need a National Conservative Party?
One would think that someone around the Speaker should realize that the optics of this are not good. Of course, to me, while this is not good, it is not as big a concern as the Democrat-oriented people the Speaker has in his entourage. Hmmm! Maybe that is who suggested the big pay increases?