Congressman wants pay cut for colleagues who allowed bailouts

Lawmakers who have demanded cuts to compensation packages on Wall Street should take a pay cut themselves, one Republican lawmaker demanded Tuesday.

Freshman Rep. Bill Posey (R-Fla.) suggested that members of Congress who enabled bailouts and allowed top financial executives' salaries to rise uncontrollably should volunteer to have their own salaries cut.

"I think we need to set the pace, and, by example, we need to cut the salary for Congress for the people who allowed this thing to happen and even pushed this thing to happen," Posey said during an interview on a conservative radio syndicate.

Posey made the remarks in reaction to the Obama administration's "pay czar," Kenneth Feinberg, having slashed salaries and compensation packages for top executives at companies on government support by as much as 90 percent.

"I just fail to see that there's any real formula for making these determinations -- that they're not just arbitrary and capricious," Posey said of Feinberg's determinations.

More broadly, the Obama administration has pursued new rules through legislation and agency regulation seeking to rein in executive compensation at top firms, and tie it more closely to job performance, while allowing shareholders in a company to have more input over compensation.

Posey, who sits on the House Financial Services Committee, was not clear about whether specific members of Congress should face a pay cut or the whole body, but even still, with support for bailout packages that put firms on government support having received bipartisan support, the Florida Republican's plan would cut against both parties.

Of course, if Posey's proposal were to target specific members for having supported certain bailout votes or policies in the past, as a freshman member of Congress, it seems that his own pay would be unaffected by any new rules.