Just like the busload of lawyers going over a cliff, it’s a start!
Somebody has to help pay for those IRS bonuses.
0 has made the world such a safe place now, do we really need a Defense Department? It’s peace and luv all the way baby...
Meanwhile fighter jets and billions of dollars are being sent to bearded savages so they can kill bearded savages and Christians and Jews.
The perfumed princes at the Pentagon blew it.
The military furlough rules are entirely political. Here are some likely facts, although I have no references so just pretend they are guesses.
1. Every branch of the military has enough money to cover the sequester, except the army. But Chuck Hagel agreed with the army that it was not “fair” if only army people were furloughed, so he ruled that all branches had to furlough equally.
2. During the furlough, every furloughed worker must take off on friday, so that there is no possibility that another worker might fill in for the furloughed worker.
3. During the furlough, no overtime for any worker furloughed. They must meticulously track their 32 hours, and leave when they are done, even if they are in the middle of a meeting, and would not have been paid for overtime.
4. During the furlough, NO work that would have been assigned to the furloughed worker may be done by any other worker.
The 4th point is hilarous — we could argue that there are too many workers for the work, and that by working more efficiently we might be able to afford cutting 20% of the workforce. But by this rule, even if you had another worker sitting around doing NOTHING all week, that worker would be prohibited from doing ANY of the work that might otherwise have been done by a furloughed worker.
In other words, the rules explicitly ensure the maximum pain.
5. All workers must submit weekly status about all the jobs not being accomplished. This takes time of course from their real work, so we are actually becoming LESS efficient in order to “prove” how bad the sequester is.
Frankly, we would have been better off if they had FIRED 20% of the workers (actually about 5%, the reason it’s 20% of a week now is that we are 3/4ths of the way through the fiscal year). If we had fired 5%, we would have had to assign their work to the remaining workers. Also, it would be a one-time pain, since those fired workers would be gone forever, and we would therefore save the money every year.
Furloughs are designed to make sure that nothing good is accomplished by the sequester. Furloughs are a GOOD WAY to handle a temporary money problem, when you assume things will get better. THey are a lousy way to handle a permanent one-time reduction in budget.
Note: the sequester WAS a permanent one-time deduction, equally 10% of the projected budget. Once you made that one-time cut, in every following year, the budget would grow at the same rate it did before, but because it would start from the 10% lower point, we’d save “10%” every year over the original budget.
Cutting one bloated program would have been all it took, since that would have saved money every year. Instead, they are explicitly making sure that NO permanent changes are made, so that every year we will have to go through the same painful and stupid process.
But Obama can go on a $100,000,000 vacation.
They need to furlough the Air Force One crew and save the taxpayers billions.
Just claim to be a pig farmer. Obama will give you $50,000.
In other news, El Douche announces a $100M trip w 500 of his closest friends and a$$kissers.
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El Douche has a twofer. A win win.
1. Cuts the military
2. Blames it on the repubs.