Low Time Pilots Good or Bad?

 Right now before congress there is a bill that is being voted on that if passed will required airline pilots to have 1500 total hours before they can step foot in an airline cockpit. Currently pilots can be hired by an airline with as little as 250 total hours of flight time. Now normally you dont see pilots getting hired by any airline with only 250 hours except for a brief span when I first starting my flight training. From around late 2006 through the begging of 2008 there were some airlines that were so desperate for pilots that the joke was they would take anyone with a commercial license and a pulse! This was due to a few factors. First a large majority of currently employed pilots where getting close to or had surpassed what was then a required 60 years old retirement age. Most these pilots where from the Vietnam War era. Secondly a new type of airliner called the regional jet was introduced and major airlines were buying them by the droves. You see with a regional jet the company could pay the pilots less since it wasn't mainline equipment and since it was a small airplane that burned less gas than the mainline equipment they didn't have to fill as many seats to make each flight profitable. So with the retiring pilot force and the growing emergence of the regional carriers there was a temporary shortage of qualified pilots. This led to many pilots being hired straight out of flight school to fly these new regional jets. Many flight school advertised from flight school to right seat in less than a year. In the past that was unheard of but now it was a reality. See there was a problem with this though. Many of the first officers lacked any real world flying experience outside of their very controlled flight training setting. It got even worse when these low time first officers were upgrading to captain as soon as they reached the required 1500 total hours to get their ATP license. You now had two pilots in the flight deck that had maybe 4 years of total experience between them. Well the stock market crash of 2008 hit and than congress passed a law allowing airline pilots to fly till 65 and this low time hiring stopped. But still you had the problem of low time pilots lacking real world experience flying these regional jets. To make things worse the pay at these regional airlines was sometimes less than $20,000 for the first year making it almost impossible for these young pilots to survive financially. And their pay doesn't get much better as years of service increase. And on top of that many of these pilots don't live in the city they are based out of so they have to fly from where they live to their base and than fly an airplane for sometimes up to 6 to 8 hours a day. This equated to under paid, over worked, and stressed out pilots in the flight deck. This was highlighted by the colgan flight that crashed near buffalo. Immediately after the crash they began to talk about the low pay and long hours that the first officer was putting up with. This issue was brought up again after the ditching in the Hudson River. The captain of that flight talked about the massive pay cuts they have had to endure and how the airlines can no longer attract the best and brightest of this country. He said he would discourage his own kids from being airline pilots due to the continually decreasing working conditions. So congress is now deciding whether or not raising the minimum requirements to be an airline pilot to 1500 total hours will help the situation at all. Some believe that by raising the minimums to 1500 total hours it will force the pay to be raised because guys with that kind of experience wont work for those that low of starting pay. But I disagree. There is too many pilots out there with shiny jet syndrome. They are happy no matter what they are being paid as long as they are flying a jet. That is part of the reason we got into this mess with the low pay rates. If people were willing to work for that kind of money when the economy was doing well they sure as heck will work for that when the economy is in the dumper. The other thing that supporters of the new minimums say is that it will increase safety. I'm not sure I agree with that either. Other countries have been putting low time pilots in the right seat of airliners for years with good safety records. A lot of it has to due with airline ground school once hired. What we need to do as a industry is address both the low pay and the current allowed working hours a day. These are the two fundamental problems in our system. Right now pilots are over worked and under paid which leads to stressed individuals and problems at home which carries over to the flight deck. Also with this low pay they are going to have trouble finding pilots to replace the large number of pilots who are creeping up on the mandatory retirement age of 65 due to the fact that starting at 20,000 a year doesn't justify taking out a 50,000-100,000 loan to cover flight training. You just can't pay it back at that pay level. Until we address these two fundamental issues we will continue to see the kinds errors that are unfortunately being common place in the paper now. So what do you think? Will raising the minimum requirements to 1500 total hours really solve the problem and is congress ignoring the key factors in this?