Congress spends tax money on luxury cars, high salaries and perks
When Corrine Brown, a Democrat from North Florida, traveled on congressional business, she used a chauffeured Lincoln Town Car and an SUV at a cost of nearly $8,000.
And Tom Rooney, a House Republican from the Treasure Coast, spent about $2,500 to maintain an aquarium in his office.
To government watchdogs monitoring how our tax dollars are spent, the expenditures suggest that some members of Congress are out of touch with the financial hardships facing many of their constituents.
"Shame on our congressmen and [congresswomen] to be so insensitive to the plight of Floridians and Americans who can barely make ends meet," said Dominic Calabro, president of Florida TaxWatch. "It's absolutely the wrong message at the wrong time."
Pete Sepp, spokesman for the National Taxpayers Union in Alexandria, Va., said lawmakers may not understand why "people could be upset over a few thousand dollars out of a budget of trillions, but it shouldn't surprise them."
"It is a very important symbol of the federal government's overall behavior to watch the p's and q's on office expenditures," Sepp said. "It's one of the few costs of government that people can relate to directly."
And it adds up to more than $1 billion a year.
Each of the nation's 535 senators and representatives receives an annual allowance for staff salaries, constituent mailings and office expenses, based in part on the distance between the lawmaker's district and Washington.
Florida's two senators get more than $4 million apiece while the state's 25 members of the U.S. House of Representatives receive about $1.5 million each. The allowance does not include the lawmaker's salary of $174,000.
The House's year-end expenses, released last month, show that nine of Florida's representatives spent more in 2009 than the previous year, including Ron Klein. The Democrat from Boca Raton described himself as a "deficit hawk and fiscal conservative" in a guest column published Feb. 25 in the Sun Sentinel.
