Tags
Agricultural Inspector, Air Traffic Controllers, Bush tax cuts, deficit, Republicans, Social Security, wage freeze, Wall Street, wars
Good call, Mr. President. You’ve hit on the reason for the $1.3 trillion deficit. Nothing to do with the crooks savvy businessmen on Wall Street or wars that never end or tax cuts for the top 2 percent. It’s the Social Security Customer Service Reps making $35,000 a year. It’s the USDA Agricultural Inspector making $30,000. It’s Correctional Officers making $46,000. It’s those greedy Air Traffic Controllers pulling down the astronomical sum of $93,000 a year.
They all just make too damn much money, and denying them a whopping 1.4% increase is surely the solution to all our budget woes. Never mind that their health insurance premiums are scheduled to go up 7.2% next year so that a wage freeze amounts to a wage cut, not a freeze.
But hey, the Republicans love you for it, and apparently that’s what matters most. They always love it when you start making concessions before you even get to the bargaining table. A tactic that paid off so well in health care reform, why not use it again when it comes to deficit reduction. Oh, by the way, what did you get in exchange for conceding this issue to the GOP? Absolutely nothing—as usual.
This just in, sir. Republicans don’t give a flying pile of horse manure about reducing the deficit. If they did, they wouldn’t be insisting on an extension of the Bush tax cuts which, given the prior record of your negotiating skills, I fully expect to see happen to some degree at today’s capitulation session bi-partisan meeting with Republican leadership.
Here’s an early “heckuva job” on that, too.
Desperado's Outpost 
mcoville said:
You want to know why it is a good idea to freeze government pay:
“The number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal salary data.
Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession’s first 18 months — and that’s before overtime pay and bonuses are counted.
Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time — in pay and hiring — during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector.
The highest-paid federal employees are doing best of all on salary increases. Defense Department civilian employees earning $150,000 or more increased from 1,868 in December 2007 to 10,100 in June 2009, the most recent figure available.
When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000.”
Read more here: http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-12-10-federal-pay-salaries_N.htm
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Salary freeze is a small step, but at least it is in the right direction for the first time in 2 years.