President Obama has made a big deal out of corporate jets. Apparently they are a symbol not of success but of greed. Yet even as the private jet marked has lagged with the ongoing recession, President Obama’s own employees in his administration have significantly increased the number of limousines available for their travel.

The private jet market has historically risen in line with corporate profits, but started a steep downturn in 2008. The result was the loss of literally thousands of jobs in the factories that make private jets, with Cessna laying off almost 9000 workers alone, mostly in that notorious haunt of millionaires in Wichita, Kansas. Meanwhile, federal government departments increased the numbers of limousines bought in the first two years of the Obama administration by 73 percent, spending $1.9 billion on new cars in 2009 alone. These aren’t cheap autos, either. The most popular model is the Cadillac DTS, with the government paying about $60,000 per vehicle. Cadillac, of course, is part of the bailed-out General Motors.

This all confirms something I examine in my new book, Stealing You Blind: How Government Fatcats Are Getting Rich Off of You. When bureaucrats have taxpayer money to spend, they spend it on themselves. In Chapter Eight (“Municipal Madness”), for example, I detail how two departments (Public Works, and Transportation) of the City of Los Angeles received $111 million between them in stimulus money, and used it to ’save or create’ just 55 jobs, nearly all of them, apparently, in the public sector.

Another example comes in the increasingly risibly-named education sphere. As we all know, vast amounts of taxpayer money have been directed towards global warming research in the past few years. This has led, as we can see from numbers compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, to a substantial increase in the salaries of “atmospheric, earth, marine and space science teachers” at public universities. In 2004, before the wave of public funding was unleashed following An Inconvenient Truth, such teachers were paid $53 an hour. Today they earn $70 an hour. On top of that, of course, they have tenure and enviable benefits, not to mention the shorter hours.

Indeed, government workers have made out like bandits while the rest of us eked out our living in the recession. According to USA Today, “When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000.” That was in 2009, before the President announced his much-vaunted “federal pay freeze.”

(more…)

I’ll keep this short.

No one understands “what” is going to be cut.  Saying discretionary spending is going to be cut over ten years sounds like a Nigerian email scam.

So please Boehner, for the love of god, listen to your buddy Morgan…. Just cut federal employee pay.

Give Obama three choices:

1. Cut Federal Employee Pay in every department except Military by $30B per year (off baseline) starting 2012:  Ten year savings $300B

2. Cut Federal Employee Pay in every department except Military by $60B per year (off baseline) starting in 2012: Ten year savings $600B+

3. Cut Federal Employee Pay in every department except Military by $90B per year (off baseline) starting in 2012: Ten year savings $1T+.

Make Obama choose.  He can’t win.

Tell him that if he chooses low, when the credit card is maxed out again, he is getting the same deal next time.   Suddenly, ALL  Federal public employees are with our program.

Overnight, the entire Federal workforce will be desperate to help Republicans make real cuts.   Overnight, our “servants” will be finally pushing out the deadwood, over the howls of their union bosses.   Let’s get public employee interests aligned with the public.

(more…)

From AFP:

US President Barack Obama on Monday proposed a freeze on most government pay in a move to trim the country’s massive deficit.

The White House said the two year freeze would save two billion dollars in the 2011 fiscal year.

The measures will apply to all civilian federal employees including at theDepartment of Defense.

Military personnel will not affected.

(more…)

From New Jersey’s Daily Record:

The Obama Administration handed out more than $400 million in awards to federal employees last year, up by more than $80 million from the prior year, according to new government data.

The biggest winners were air traffic controllers and top managers in Washington, a review of fiscal year 2009 salary reports from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management showed.

OPM’s data, obtained by the Asbury Park Press through a freedom of information request, account for 1.3 million employees, or about 65 percent of the federal civilian work force.

(more…)

Nearly one in five federal employees paid $100,000 a year or more, and that doesn’t count overtime pay or bonuses

Congress to increase the federal debt ceiling by $1.8 trillion before year’s end

Minneapolis puppet show receives federal stimulus dollars

Columbus City Schools have more than 120 buildings, but the district is renting banquet halls, high-end hotels and conference centers with $145,000 in federal grant dollars intended help low-income students

Washington, DC receiving nearly 10 times as much federal stimulus funds per capita as the rest of the nation

(more…)