UPDATE:
The House of Representatives voted to freeze Obama’s congressional and federal pay raises.
The House of Representatives is poised to vote as early as tonight on a bill addressing a series of tax increases and spending cuts taking affect this week. But first lawmakers voted on a plan to freeze the salaries of lawmakers and federal employees.
Despite Democratic objections, the bill passed 287 to 129, with 55 Democrats voting with Republicans to approve the measure.
It’s temporary. You can bet your ass those raises will take effect soon.
Original story:
Fiscal restraint? What the hell is that?
From The Weekly Standard.
Barack Obama issued an executive order to end the pay freeze on federal employees, in effect giving some federal workers a raise. One federal worker now to receive a pay increase is Vice President Joe Biden.
According to disclosure forms, Biden made a cool $225,521 last year. After the pay increase, he’ll now make $231,900 per year.
Members of Congress, from the House and Senate, also will receive a little bump, as their annual salary will go from $174,000 to 174,900. Leadership in Congress, including the speaker of the House, will likewise get an increase.
Here’s the list of new wages, as attached to President Obama’s executive order:
“A new executive order has been issued providing for a new pay schedule beginning ‘on the first day of the first applicable pay period beginning after March 27, 2013,'” reports FedSmith.com. “The pay raise will generally be about 1/2 of 1%.”
Jeryl Bier points to an example of the pay increase for average government executives:
“Not much of an increase, but an increase all the same,” Bier notes.
And the timing isn’t great either: Just as President Obama and Congress try to avert going over the “fiscal cliff,” he doles out pay increases to federal workers.
UPDATE: According to a senior Republican congressional aide who has reviewed the executive order and consulted with the Congressional Budget Office, Obama’s pay raise will cost $11 billion. “The CBO told us that the President’s pay raise for federal workers will cost $11 billion over ten years,” says the aide.
Nothing like rubbing the taxpayer’s face in the government’s greedy indifference. The bloated, overpaid bureaucracy gets bigger all the time and the average American couldn’t care less. The SCOAMF’s re-installment is proof positive.
Related articles
- Obama’s fiscal cliff solution? Federal pay raises! (twitchy.com)
- Obama So Worried About “Fiscal Cliff” That He’s Ordered $11B In Pay Raises For Federal Workers (thedaleygator.wordpress.com)
- While the Rest of the Country Suffers… Obama Gives Joe Biden and Congress a Raise (thegatewaypundit.com)
Both Republican and Democratic Congressional leaders and Obama have reduced the discussions over the fiscal cliff to marginal tax rates and whether to CPI social security. Overlooked is the solution that takes the fiscal cliff and the debt ceiling as symptoms of a larger, more fundamental problem, whose solution transcends the fiscal cliff even while solving that problem. In http://www.thewordenreport.blogspot.com/2012/12/with-just-days-to-avert-beginning-of.html at the Worden Report, I present this overlooked solution.
Reblogged this on catherinephung.