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Show ECONOMICAL SALARIES One of the chief recommendations recommenda-tions of the Hoover Commission four years ago was that federal government salaries be increased to bring better men into government govern-ment service. Salaries were raised at that time in the case of key officials in the executive branch, but not in the cases of judges and members of Congress. A bill . is pending in Congress now to carry out the Hoover Commission Com-mission proposal by raising judicial judi-cial and congressional salaries $10,000 a year. The same bill would allow the Attorney General to set the compensation of U. S. district attorneys between $12,-000 $12,-000 and $20,000 yearly. It has been approved unanimously by the Judiciary Committee of the Senate. Quite properly, the bill has been free from partisan controversy. contro-versy. It isn't a partisan issue. The sole issue involved is whether wheth-er higher salaries would attract stronger, abler men to the Congress Con-gress and the bench. The American Ameri-can Bar Association, and various other organizations supporting the bill, believe it would. They argue that government service should not be confined by economic circumstances cir-cumstances to the independently wealthy, or to incompetents. President Pres-ident Eisenhower said much the same thing in his press conference recently when he observed that, with taxes what they are, we are approaching a time when only people of independent means could enter public life. He thought that was not a healthy condition and we agree. We doubt that the average citizen cit-izen is aware that a U. S. district court judge, for example, actually receives less salary today in terms of purchasing power than he did in 1939. And few people who live on less money than a congressman con-gressman is paid realize that he usually has to maintain two homes in Washington and in his district dis-trict do a lot of traveling and official entertaining, and run for office every two years. The result re-sult is that many resort to hiring members of their families as office of-fice assistants, or spend time on outside writing or speaking that they could well be devoting to their congressional duties. What would the proposed in crease cost? The net cost, after taxes, would be $3,465,000 in the case of members of Congress, and $2,240,000 in the case of federal judges, a total of $5,700,000 a year. That figures out as only a tiny fraction of one per cent of the total cost of the federal government. gov-ernment. It would be a small price to pay for better courts and more government efficiency. As one editor put it, it would be a case of "saving billions at a cost of thousands." |