Joe Cunningham: “I voted against the bill that would have a pay increase. In our own conference when the veterans' COLA came up, I fought…”

“I voted against the bill that would have a pay increase. In our own conference when the veterans' COLA came up, I fought against my own Republican Party because they wanted to cut a veterans' COLA. Why? Veterans sign on a dotted line that if they serve the amount of time in the service of this country, and at the end of that time that is the contract they operated under, they would have a retirement; and that that retirement, should it lose money each year because of inflation, that was not the intent. I chastised my own party for that. We turned that around. If you had a pay increase that gave you more money than just maintaining parity, it is a parity issue, does the dollar maintain the same value that you came with, then I think Members have got the right to chastise what we are doing here. But in an amendment that maintains parity, that is a half a percent below actual parity, then I do not think the Members have a complaint as far as a COLA, because most of us support a COLA for Social Security. We support it for our veterans. We support it for Federal employees, because it maintains the dollar value that those individuals have in their paycheck. It is not meant to get less and less and less with inflation, depending on what it is. That is the same reason most of us support indexing of capital gains, because it indexes the value of that dollar right along with inflation.”