I've documented on this site the many (2, 3) anti-liberal positions and actions of the Obama administration. Now add to those his new call to freeze the pay of federal government workers for the remaining two years of his first term.
If you still consider Obama a "liberal," as for example Michael Gerson recently did in the Washington Post, how do you explain Obama's pay freeze, which sticks it to the unionized federal workers, one of the Democrats' core constituencies, harms the efficacy of government, undermines economic recovery, while doing almost nothing to reduce the federal deficit.
In 2009 the US federal government spent about $3.5 trillion. Assuming roughly the same spending for 2010, that would mean $7 trillion spent over two years. The president's pay freeze will save a minuscule .07 percent of total spending - roughly $5 billion over two years.
NOTE: Post updated to fix math error.
12 comments:
It's easy to bashed gov't workers...even amoung Democrats. I should be surprised Obama thru Fed Workers under the bus...but at this point I'm not. It's a cheap way to "bargin" with the Rethugs. but it won't satisfy them. What's the learning curve for Obama???He keeps messing with his constituency.
But he's not even negotiating. Even if you were to give Obama the benefit of the doubt - and at this point, I don't - and say he heart is in the right place, his inepitude is titannic. He just gives stuff away.
Imagine Obama as your lawyer in a divorce. You'd lose all the money, the house, the kids, the dog, AND the fillings in your teeth.
Tom Tomorow has it right. Here's the last panel from the cartoon at the link.
Well, according to great mind Michael Medved, Obama just wasn't enthusiastic enough about the pay freeze, which is why he's a liberal-commie-nazi-socialist. Or something.
Obama needs to be convinced, and then act on that conviction, that the Republicans single goal for the next two years is to deny Obama a second term. They will do anything, up to and including destroying the economy, to accomplish.
But prospects are dim.
He's not even bargaining! He's just giving them what they want in hopes that they might be nice later. Balancing the budget on the backs of middle class folks is inexcusable.
Also, where the hell is Joe "middle class watchdog" Biden? Is he completely neutered?
My crude calculation is that 5B / 7T = 0.07%. My number 0.07 divided by your number 0.002 is 35. One of us has made a huge error (probably me, as I was educated in a non-union school.) Where did I go wrong?
You might reply that the number is so close to zero that it doesn't matter; if that's so please, send me 0.07% of your salary. Heck, using that logic, send me triple your salary. Thanks.
You're right - I calculated wrong. When I calcuate that I do get .07 percent, not the .002. That's still less than one-tenth of one percent.
There must a slogan in there somewhere. How about, "Plutocracy, better than Nazism!"
I think the President needs to have these quotes repeated to him over and over. Oh and so does Mr. Westover:
I hope we shall . . . crush in [its] birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations." Thomas Jefferson
"When economic power... became concentrated in a few hands, then political power flowed to those possessors and away from the citizens, ultimately resulting in an oligarchy or tyranny." John Adams
"As riches increase and accumulate in few hands . . . the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard." Alexander Hamilton
While the various cuts in spending, each by themselves, doesn't fix the deficit or the debt, a few billion here and a few billion there (earmarks, government worker wages, etc.) all start to add up. Once the "scalpel czar" gets around to showing the billions in government waste that the President charged him to do almost two years ago, there will be even more drops in the bucket. Part of our spending problem lies with the fact that we regularly put the word "only" in front of billions of dollars.
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