Obama: Wants Pay Hikes for Federal Workers

Washington DC, Feb 15, 2012. President Obama wants to give raises to people collecting federal paychecks, but in his new budget proposal, troops would get a larger pay boost than civilian employees.

The White House budget plan released Monday would increase federal civilian pay by a modest 0.5 percent, a bump that would end a two-year cost-of-living pay freeze. Uniformed military personnel would receive a 1.7 percent raise in 2013, the increase indicated by law, according to the proposal.

While this proposed pay hike is modest, when combined with the extremely generous benefit package that federal workers get, this will widen the gap between public sector workers and private sector workers.

A recent CBO (Congressional Budget Office) study shows that federal employees earned an average 16% more in total compensation, meaning pay and benefits, versus workers at private companies.

Public sector unions will not share in the sacrifice

The study comes at a time when President Barack Obama has called for "shared sacrifice" in the form of higher taxes in his State of the Union address and campaign speeches.

The full-time federal workforce has grown by 140,000 employees during the president’s term, to about 2.2 million workers.

Federal-worker compensation was higher versus what private-sector workers receive in almost all categories, the CBO study says.

Compensation for federal workers costs taxpayers about $200 billion a year, the CBO study says. Of that sum, $80 billion was spent on federal workers in national defense, the study says, with the remaining $120 billion spent on personnel in other federal agencies.

Federal benefits drove the swing higher versus the private sector. The average benefits package for federal workers, including health and retirement benefits, costs taxpayers a whopping 48% more on average than what private sector workers get in comparable jobs, the CBO study says.


"While millions of Americans continue to struggle with stagnant wages and high unemployment, government bureaucrats in Washington continue to enjoy significant advantages over those whose tax dollars finance their compensation," says a statement by the office of Rep. Paul Ryan, R-WI, chairman of the House Budget Committee.

A USA Today analysis of the federal “job for life” issue in July 2011 found that in 2010, federal workers enjoyed a 99.43% job security rate, and in many agencies, employees were more likely to die of natural causes than get laid off or fired by the federal government.

The paper also says the federal government fired just 0.55% of its workers in the budget year ending September 2010, versus a rate of firings in the private sector that was about six times higher, at around 3%.

Obama phones Cost Taxpayers $1.6 Billion in 2011

A real "Obama Phone" sold in Kenya

Washington DC, Feb 9, 2012. Last year, the federal Lifeline program paid out $1.6 billion to cover free cell phones and the monthly bills of 12.5 million wireless accounts.

These are the free cell phones that you often hear called "Obama Phones." In fact, if you google "Obama Phone" you will be directed to the program's website.

The Lifeline program is administered by the FCC with the goal of helping low-income Americans have phone service. Participation has been rising steeply since 2008, when the government paid $772 million for phones and monthly bills.

But some complain that the program suffers from poor oversight, in which phones go to people who don't qualify, and hundreds of thousands of those who do qualify have more than one phone. Like all government benefits, if there is a way to abuse it, that way will be found.

The Lifeline program provides low-income Americans with free cell phones (basic ones such as those made by Tracfone, not smartphones) and covers up to 250 free minutes each month.

Bloomberg Businessweek reports how much the program pays out  and how quickly it's growing as more and more people find out about it. In 2011, Lifeline paid out $1.6 billion, more than double the amount paid in 2008 ($772 million). What's more, an FCC audit of the program last year showed that many participants in the program were taking more than their fair share.

"Can you hear me now?"

According to Businessweek:

"269,000 wireless Lifeline subscribers were receiving free phones and monthly service from two or more carriers."

Senator Claire McCaskill, D-MO, has personally received an invitation to apply for a free, government-subsidized cell phone in the mail.

McCaskill is a multi-millionaire, and shouldn't qualify for a free phone, yet she was offered one!

First Lady Goes on $50,000 Lingerie Shopping Spree

NYC, Feb 2, 2012. First Lady Michelle Obama is doing her part to help the economy and create new jobs. Last week she spent $50,000 at Agent Provocateur, a high end lingerie boutique, buying a few necessities for her wardrobe. 

Fortunately the store Mrs. Obama shopped at is located on Madison Avenue in NYC, and not one in the UK, so her spending could create some jobs here in the USA. She is setting a good example on how women can help kickstart the economy.

The purchase of high priced underwear certainly raises questions about how serious the Obamas are about "shared sacrifice" at a time when most American women are scrimping and saving and trying to stretch every dollar they have left.

Beautiful lingerie costs plenty

Up until now, the First Lady has been careful to portray herself as a smart shopper and bargain hunter who buys her clothing at Target like common people do. Spending this much on high end lingerie certainly doesn't fit with this image. For most American women, $50,000 is "the price of two cars" and not the cost of a few pieces of nice underwear.

There was some speculation as to why the First Lady needed to buy such expensive lingerie. Her husband, the President, seems to be spending a lot of time on the golf course and this might have something to do with keeping him home more often.

The White House issued an angry denial following claims that Michelle Obama indulged in this $50,000 shopping spree at a luxury lingerie boutique in New York.

According to one report, Agent Provocateur's boutique on Madison Avenue in NYC was partially closed off for the U.S. First Lady to shop without being unnecessarily disturbed by her fans and admirers. 

Kristina Schake, director of communications for First Lady Michelle Obama said: "This story is 100 per cent false. She never spent that much."

Secret Service Abandons Obama To Protect Romney

President surrounded by his former SS bodyguards

Washington DC, Feb 1, 2012. In a startling and completely unexpected move, the Secret Service team assigned to protect President Barack Hussein Obama, D-Kenya, walked off the job last night and headed to the home of Mitt and Ann Romney to begin protecting them.

This bizarre event happened at precisely 8:05 PM EST last night, when all the major television networks called the Florida Primary race for Republican frontrunner and likely next President Mitt Romney, R-MA.

The Secret Service team felt like they were needed to protect the next President and made this move on their own without actually receiving any orders to do so.

Secret Service Director Henry Wilkerson said in response to the news... "The action taken by this rouge team of Secret Service agents is against all of the rules and will not be tolerated. They should have waited until Obama officially loses the election in November. They really jumped the gun on this."

SS Team dutifully waiting at Romney's Belmont MA home

"I realize they probably thought they were doing what was best for the nation, but we will recall that team and replace them with another one. And they will be reprimanded for this. It will go in their permanent records."

Wilkerson went on to say that a new team of SS agents would be assigned to protect Mitt Romney, but the current team assigned to Barack Obama would be replaced due to their "obvious disloyalty."

Obama Allows Record Bonuses for Bank CEOs

President Obama takes his orders from Corporate Capitalists

NYC, Jan 30, 2012. The nation’s top six banks (Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs) paid out $144 billion in bonuses and compensation for 2011, which is almost equal to the $147 billion they paid out in 2007 at the height of the economic boom.

Four banks of these banks, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Morgan Stanley, were awarded record high bonuses and compensation.

And this was despite their bleak stock performance during the year. So these guys are getting paid more, for even worse performance than they had when Obama called their bonuses "obscene."

Whatever happened to that campaign promise President Barack Huessein Obama, D-Kenya, made in 2008 when he was running for President that he would "put an end to these obscene bonuses?"

When Barack Obama was campaigning in 2008, and several times since he was elected President, he referred to these "obscene bank bonuses" and vowed he would put an end to them.

President Obama even appointed a Czar for Executive Compensation, Kenneth Feinberg at a salary of $120,830 per year, to guarantee that this wouldn't happen again. But despite all the talk and the appontiment of a special Czar, the "obscene" bonuses are back, and just as obscene as they ever were. And to make matters worse, these CEO's and high level managers are performing worse than they did in 2007.

Kenneth Feinberg, Obama's CEO Compensation Czar

Feinberg was tasked with holding down the executive salaries and bonuses of any company who took federal money under the TARP or other bailout programs. These included big banks, insurance companies,  giant Wall Street brokerage firms, and huge mulinational corporations like GE and GM.

But in March 2009, AIG disbursed $165 million in taxpayer-funded Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds to its top executives, prompting a massive public backlash.

Obama officials reportedly lobbied Congress to insert legislative language allowing the AIG bonus payments and then apparently lied about their knowledge of the payment scheme. The meetings at issue in Judicial Watch’s FOIA request took place in November 2009, just weeks after Feinberg publicly announced pay cuts and salary caps for AIG’s top paid executives.

And today we discover that the six largest banks, all of whom took bailout money from the federal government, are now right back to to passing out "obscene bonuses" to their top executives. And in some cases, the bonuses are even bigger than when Obama vowed to put an end to them.

“Even though top bank executives have claimed that bonuses are down as much as 30 percent for 2011, total compensation has not decreased at all,” according to The New Bottom Line’s report, “Pulling Back The Curtain: The 1% Behind The 2011 Big Bank Bonuses.”

Some banks did cut back on their bonuses but compensated for this by increasing base salaries. For example, base salaries for named executive officers at Goldman Sachs more than tripled in 2011. At JPMorgan Chase, named executive officers saw salaries go up 50 percent.

Just half of the banks’ bonus and compensation pools would be enough to write down the principals on all underwater mortgages in the country. 

If the six banks took half of their bonus and compensation pool and put it directly into a public service jobs fund, they could create 1.8 million jobs.

And they would still have enough money left over to pay the average employee $60,605.

Just 72% of the $144 billion in bonuses and compensation at the top six banks would have been enough money to plug the $102.9 billion in budget holes for all 50 states for the current fiscal year.

Gingrich Pledges Moon Colony If Elected

COCOA, Fla. Jan 27, 2012.  Republican Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich told a cheering crowd along Florida's Space Coast late Wednesday that he would establish a permanent colony on the moon, and develop a spacecraft that can get to Mars, by the end of his second term as president.

Gingrich, who has long held a fascination with space exploration and has talked extensively about further missions to the moon, Mars and beyond, committed for the first time to pushing aggressively for such programs if he wins the White House.

Just a few miles from Cape Canaveral, he played to a crowd eager for a renewal of the nation's space program. The speech also gave him a chance to tweak Mitt Romney, his leading rival for the GOP nomination, who has mocked Gingrich's "zany" ideas.

"I was attacked the other night for being grandiose," Gingrich said. "I would just want you to note: Lincoln standing at Council Bluffs was grandiose. The Wright Brothers standing at Kitty Hawk were grandiose. John F. Kennedy was grandiose. I accept the charge that I am grandiose and that Americans are instinctively grandiose."

The line drew raucous applause from a crowd of at least 500 in a hotel ballroom here, as did Gingrich's lengthy riff on his fascination with space travel. His interest goes back to his early youth, when he read Missiles and Rockets magazine and obsessed over the Soviet Sputnik program. He also proclaimed that the "weirdest thing" he ever did in Congress was to introduce a "Northwest Ordinance for space" that would allow a moon colony to become a state once 13,000 lived there.

"Here's the difference between so-called romantics and practical people," Gingrich said during his address. "I want every single young American to say to themselves, I could become one of those 13,000, I can be part of building a bigger, better future, be part of a generation of courageous people who do something big and bold. We want Americans to think bolder about space and rebuild the country we love."

The plan is endorsed by surviving Heaven's Gate members

That last line drew a thunderous applause and drew the room to its feet.

Gingrich also said that exploration  of the moon and beyond would have far-reaching commercial applications. He talked of "commercial, near-earth activities" including science, tourism and manufacturing.

Gingrich's proposal was completely embraced by the remaining survivors of the Heaven's Gate Cult.

This was the religious cult that committed mass suicide in March, 1997, in hopes of joining up with a spaceship that was thought to be following the Halle Bopp Comet.

Opinion: Why We Can't Seem to Cut Spending

It's no secret that the USA is in deep financial trouble. 

We currently have racked up a $15.5 trillion national debt... one third of which was added in just the past four years... and we are borrowing 40 cents of every dollar we spend.

There seem to be three approaches to solving this problem:

* Cut spending. Stop borrowing. 
* Tax the crap out of the rich to pay for it
* Some combination of both

But we have a problem with all three of these. Raising taxes during a recession is generally considered the worst possible thing you can do. The last President who tried it was Herbert Hoover in 1929, and it was widely thought to have made the Great Depression even worse. Besides, when people are struggling to buy groceries the very last thing they need is higher taxes.

Even President Obama, who campaigned on a promise that he would "repeal the Bush tax cuts" reversed himself right before they expired and asked Congress to extend them. He told us that "raising taxes during a recession would cost us an additional million jobs." And he was right.

And it's not very easy to cut spending either, because our "discretionary spending" is the smallest portion of our federal budget. If you want to cut any entitlement, you will have voters howling in protest. I'm not talking only about welfare and food stamps here, these are relatively small costs. The big entitlements are social security, medicare, and medicaid.

Think about what happens whenever you try to cut these things:

• Cutting Social Security and Medicare is almost impossible because those people actually PAID for it. We stole their trust fund, and now we can hardly ask them to take a cut. Plus, senior citizens never forget to vote. This is why they call social security the "third rail of politics."

• Cutting Interest Payments on the Debt is even harder to do. This would be "defaulting" and would send the nation into a total financial collapse. This simply is not an option.

• Cutting Agricultural Subsidies could help, but the amount of money involved is relatively small. And then all the farm states would be up in arms, and food prices would go up.

• Cutting National Defense is a risky proposition, but it will happen. Still, the entire defense budget is less than half of our annual deficit. That's right, if we had absolutely no army or navy, we would still be $800 billion in the red. Plus the current defense budget is near an all time low as a percentage of the budget.

Go ahead, cut welfare, food stamps, college loans, foreign aid, veterans benefits, cut it all out, and you still haven't made a significant dent in our deficit.

Because all our discretionary spending combined is currently less than the budget deficit, and half of it is defense related.

Is there a way out of this mess?

Yes, but it isn't one of the three ways listed at the top of this post.

The only way out of this mess is to put America back to work. President Obama might think that "10% unemployment is the new normal" but it simply isn't sustainable for very long. We need more people working and less people looking to the government for sustenance. We really need more people producing things we can export.

This means we would somehow have to reverse the flow of jobs offshore. And this is lot easier said than done, since we seem to like buying imported goods for less at Walmart.

The best solution may be to cut spending where we can, then freeze the rest of it, while having a real plan for domestic job creation. Our government must shrink. We cannot afford to have upwards of 20% of our total workforce employed by various levels of government.

People want things for free

The key to restoring our economy isn't in extending unemployment benefits, or in more generous welfare and food stamp subsidies... it's in putting America back to work.

We simply cannot continue to be a nation who consumes a lot, and then produces less and less. And who borrows money to pay for it. We cannot be "Greece on a grand scale." Not if we want our children and grandchildren to enjoy some degree of prosperity in their lives. 

Incidentally, Europe is in much the same shape. Their social spending will overwhelm their own economies is a few more years. The future might belong to the undeveloped nations who have resources... like Brazil, India and China.