Federal Wage Freeze

Federal employees will not receive any pay increases for two years, Obama administration officials announced on Monday. President Obama's proposed pay freeze for 2011 and 2012 will apply to all civilian workers, including Defense Department employees, but not military personnel.

Federal civilian employees... I welcome you to a taste of what the rest of the economy has been going through for a few years now. I am sorry that you have to join in all the fun, but it was bound to happen sometime. If you can ignore inflation for the moment... just be glad that you are not yet seeing pay cuts in addition to your wage freeze.

According to an administration statement, the two-year pay freeze will save $2 billion for the remainder of fiscal year 2011, $28 billion over the next five years, and more than $60 billion over the next decade.

The projected savings of $60 Billion over 10 years hardly seems like it will bring the government back into "fiscal responsibility." It is as if this drop in the bucket will magically remove the mortgage crisis, or the private bank bailouts, or the massive amounts of quantitative easing taking place.

From the White House Fact Sheet:

Because of the irresponsibility of the past decade, [Really only the last 10 years?!?] the President inherited a $1.3 trillion projected deficit upon taking office and an economic crisis that threatened to put the nation into a second Great Depression. He moved quickly to get the economy moving again. Now, the economy is growing,[How is that?] and we have gained private sector jobs for the past 10 months.[Again, How is that?] But families and businesses are still hurting, and our top priority is making sure that we are doing everything we can to help boost economic growth and spur job creation.[Oh I see... wait no I don't.]

Now, we need to turn our attention to addressing the massive deficits we inherited and the unsustainable fiscal course that we are on. Doing so will take some very tough choices. Just as families and businesses around the nation have tightened their belts so must their government.[By of course helping the families of federal workers to tighten their belts.] That must be done in a targeted way that focuses our investments in what works and in what will lay the foundation for job creation and economic growth for years to come while cutting back elsewhere in our budget.

Most people have a hard time seeing problems in the economy until they are directly effected by those problems. Maybe this will wake a large portion of our population up.