A fiscally sustainable course
After being rebuffed in an attempt to peel back the union protections of federal workers, President Trump took aim elsewhere on Thursday: at their paychecks.
Invoking authority that he and other presidents have used previously, Mr. Trump told Congress he was canceling government pay increases scheduled for next year.
Of course he did. Huge tax cut for the already rich, wage freeze for the people who earn a paycheck.
In a letter to congressional leaders, Mr. Trump said the government would forgo an automatic 2.1 percent pay increase for federal workers scheduled for Jan. 1 and specified that there would be no across-the-board increase for 2019. The letter did not estimate the overall savings from canceling the raises, though it said a related move canceling raises that are based on the workers’ location would save $25 billion.
And it would save even more to pay them nothing at all. Trump keeps wages down at Mar-a-lago by hiring temporary workers from poor countries at the very same time as he rants and raves about keeping foreign workers out of the country.
“We must maintain efforts to put our nation on a fiscally sustainable course, and federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases,” the president wrote.
But they can afford huge tax cuts. They can afford the expense of flying Trump to a golf course every third day or so, and secret service protection for his goons sons when they travel for his company. They can afford whatever luxury Trump demands, but they can’t afford to raise wages slightly at a time when the cost of housing, education, and health care is shooting up.
Mr. Trump’s letter came days after a federal judge struck down key provisions of three executive orders the president had signed in May that had made it easier to fire federal workers and limited the power of their unions. The administration appeared to be dragging its feet this week on complying with the judge’s orders, with some agencies telling managers and union officials that the new policies remained in effect until further notice.
Many legal experts were puzzled because the orders were supposed to apply immediately.
Well I don’t suppose they were really “puzzled.” Trump is a lawless monster who hates anything that benefits anyone other than brass-haired loud-mouthed millionaires from Queens.
But while saying it was still considering further action in the case, the administration acknowledged at least a temporary setback on Wednesday, when the Office of Personnel Management put out updated guidance that rescinded the portions of the instructions that the judge had struck down.
Union officials in at least one agency, the Social Security Administration, exulted as they were told that they would be allowed back into offices that managers had evicted them from when the executive orders took effect this summer.
That’s good. The eviction move had made it impossible to do their jobs.
Via Rob at Miscellany Room
I wonder if that will give those ICE staff who love him so pause for thought.
Yeah, and a lot of Trump supporters won’t have a problem with this. I know a lot of people that think government workers are paid huge amounts of money for doing nothing at all. I used to have to put up with my ex husband’s family (he was not my ex then) who insisted that I was not working because I worked in a state job. In reality, I worked more hours than any of them, and was making less money than they were. I did have better benefits, and a more secure position, but…that was how government got workers to work for so little. Nowadays, the benefits aren’t nearly as good, and the pay is worse than when I was working there years ago. And people still think government workers “lean on their shovels”.
If any of these naysayers had ever done road work, they would understand why the workers need to lean on their shovel every now and then. And when I was working for private employers, the standards I had to meet were actually lower than in government work. I was required to have a minimum 95% accuracy when I worked for Social Security; nearly all the employees there had an accuracy >99%. And still we heard the newspapers, pundits, and average Joes at the cafe carp on how stupid, lazy, and inaccurate we were.
Ben Radford was going on one time about the million errors they found in the Social Security database. If you consider that million errors as a percentage of the amount of entries that are being made every day, and the size of the database (one of the largest in the world, surely), that comes to a better than 99% accuracy. Can he claim that good a record? I imagine not. But they use absolute numbers because a million just translates into “a hell of a lot” and people have no clue that it’s a tiny amount when you’re talking about billions of entries.
So Trump will score one with his followers, and probably won’t get that much pushback from others, because so many people have been trained for so long to think the government workers are basically on posh welfare checks.
As far as I’m concerned, an American who calls themselves fiscally conservative while wanting no cuts to military expenditure is automatically full of shit.
PD, I’ve met only one person in my life that would meet your definition – my father-in-law. He also had no truck with corporate welfare, another place you don’t see “conservatives” wanting cuts. They want to get rid of worker protections, welfare, payment for government workers, and taxes (at least property taxes – sales taxes they seem fine with because they tax the poor disproportionately). Ergo, I have concluded that conservatism died the same day my father-in-law did.
Does anybody else suspect that the phrase ‘fiscally sustainable’ did not come from either Trump’s brain or his writing crayon?