Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I would like to address a few of the comments that the gentleman opposite made. When he said not a word has been mentioned about bonuses for contractors, I would remind the gentleman that in the NDAA we addressed this very subject. So that was addressed, which I'm sure the gentleman was here for that particular vote; but as we've looked at this, we have addressed that particular thing. I will go ahead and talk about a couple of other things, though. We talk about this pay freeze and how we're asking so many people to suffer. I'm not talking about the normal pay that we would give employees. I'm talking about the excessive bonuses that have failed to be an incentive anymore. When you give a bonus to 75 percent of the employees, it ceases to be an incentive; in fact, quite the opposite. All you have to do is make sure that you are not in the bottom quartile. It says all I have to do is perform better than only a few people to get my bonus. So if I'm just better than the worst 25 percent, I get a bonus. That's not an incentive. That's why we're looking at 33 percent. It rewards those people who rise to the top, the cream of the crop, and we need to do that. I also want to mention that we were talking about all these pay freezes. Where is a pay freeze not a pay freeze? Only in Washington, D.C. Mr. Speaker, 99.4 percent of Federal employees got an increase in salary during this pay freeze. That's the only ones we denied were 6 out of every 1,000 employees.…”