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Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Raising the False Alarm

By now, you have probably seen the scare headlines that the Pentagon intends to furlough 800,000 civilian workers if sequestration goes ahead.  Oh no!  That is just horrible!  Then reality comes back into focus.

1)  The 800,000 workers are all civilians who work for the Department of Defense.  Guess what, the Pentagon is not laying them all off.  Despite the headlines, the plan mentioned today is for workers to have one day off every other week in order to cut costs to meet sequestration.  That is hardly "hollowing out" the military.

2)  Were the Pentagon to actually lay off 5% of its civilian work force, it would come very close to saving the same amount of funds as this plan to furlough all of the workers.  Of course, that would only produce headlines about a small number of layoffs rather than 800,000.  Is there even one person in this country who believes that the Pentagon operates so efficiently that it could not achieve the same result with 5% fewer workers?  I hope no one is that deluded.

3)  If it is really so important to keep payroll reductions below 5%, then the Pentagon could impose a 2 or 3% pay cut on all of the civilian work force.  That would save about half the jobs.  Maybe as an alternative, rules that give federal workers extra days off or better health care than private workers could be modified.  Asking federal workers to pay more for their healthcare might close the entire gap and save every job.

4)  If the Pentagon were to close some unnecessary bases around the world, we could see the savings achieved that would also prevent the furloughs.  How about bringing half of the American forces in South Korea home?  Not only would we see major savings, but the expenditures for those troops would be in the USA and help our economy rather than that of South Korea.  Remember that the purpose of American troops in Korea is mainly to show solidarity against the North Koreans.  We can do that with 20,000 troops just the same as we can with 40,000.

The truth is that this latest ploy is nothing more than an attempt by the Obama administration to pressure Congress to stop the sequester.  Obama still has no detailed plan about what ought to be done.  Nevertheless, the nonsense continues.


1 comment:

fastcarken said...

White collar government employees barely produce 4 days a week anyway. Hopefully, they will go by Kennedy's words, Don't ask what your Country can do for you, ASK What YOU can DO for YOUR COUNTRY.
A partial oaf of bread is much better than no loaf at all!!!
Besides, It is time we stop spending our tax payers monet protecting countries that make NO contributions to the U.S. efforts. IMHO.