There's a lot of hullabaloo how President Obama's federal wage freeze is so very bad, bad bad for the US.
Well, I AM a federal employee, and I don't see it that way.
More over the fold.
I have three main positive points that I see coming from the President's announcement to freeze federal pay for two years.
The first one is a matter of simple expediency. For those of you not in the know, we lowly federal employees get raises based on 1) time and 2) a base raise that congress has to vote on every year anyway. So, I ask you, considering the current make up of congress, what are the odds that we would get raises anyway? Considering how obstructionist that the GOP has been, and will continue to be, I'd say the odds were pretty much zero anyway. All Obama has done is taken that power away from Congress by not trying to push through a raise. He's taken something that could only be negative and turned it into a potential positive, which leads me to point two.
By freezing wages, Obama has basically said, "OK, you campaigned on cuts, and I've just made one. What are YOU going to do?" By leading by example, he's called the Republican fiscal-conservativism bluff. The best part of it is, there's no way for Republicans to spin this negatively. Anyone who criticizes this move is going to seem unserious about deficit reduction. Seeing as pretty much every Republican (especially tea-partiers) campaigned on this, this seems unlikely.
The last thing is by showing a willingness to actually be that Republicans are attempting to portray themselves as, he might just peel some of the teapartiers off from their party when it comes to budgetary votes, or at the very least, make them very, very unhappy having to tow the party line. Admittedly, this one seems less likely, considering how Republicans usually act, but we'll see what the infusion of tea-partiers does in the coming congress (pun fully intended).
Am I happy about a wage freeze for me in the next two years? Hell no. But I also refuse to be caught up in the wailing, moaning and gnashing of teeth that I see on here when the President does something 'unliberal'.