Earlier this year, when it was disclosed that Governor Pat Quinn's budget director had handed out two pay raises to top staffers on the same day that the governor signed the income-tax increase into law, Illinois Republican Party Chair Pat Brady said the move was evidence of a "void in leadership."
I tend to ignore or downplay most pay-raise stories unless they're particularly egregious. Unlike the government-haters, I try to understand that the benefits of employee morale and retention are as important in government as they are in the private sector, where raises for mid- to high-level executives are the norm, not the exception.
There's definitely a market for these sorts of stories, however. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported September 15 that real average weekly earnings are in a national deflationary slide and suffered a 2.5-percent drop over the previous year. So, it's easy to see how taxpayers would be susceptible to reporting that purports to show that their government isn't acting responsibly during a crisis.