Capitol Foolery

October 1st, 2009 in Congress, Spending, Taxes ~ (1) Comment

I am so incredibly… well, I struggle to find a single English word to describe what I feel right now. Exasperated, baffled, incensed, and speechless will have to do.

Paid to do nothing

From federaltimes.com:

The U.S. Postal Service, struggling with a massive deficit caused by plummeting mail volume, spends more than a million dollars each week to pay thousands of employees to sit in empty rooms and do nothing.

Mail volume is down 12.6 percent compared with last year, and many postal supervisors simply don’t have enough work to keep all employees busy. But a thicket of union rules prevents managers from laying off excess employees… So they sit–some for a few hours, others for entire shifts. … Employees are often forbidden from doing almost anything while on standby time … [t]hat means no books, no playing cards, no watching television.

“Thirty thousand employees, that’s how much we’re overstaffed,” said Mark Saunders, a spokesman for the Postal Service.

So What Would Congress Do?

Democrats moved to exempt the Postal Service from having to make $4 billion in payments due next week to cover retirement health benefits for its employees. [From Politico.com]

In other words, a $4 billion dollar bailout.

Hmm, do you suppose we could pay Congress to do nothing? In a way, we already are…

Paid more to be idiots

The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently released the unemployment numbers as of August, 2009: a whopping 9.7% nationally, and 11.5% in SC.

So What Would Congress Do? Again, from Politico.com:

Under a House-Senate conference measure poised for passage on Wednesday, spending for the legislative branch will increase 5.8% this year, boosting Capitol Hill’s annual budget to $4.7 billion.

The measure includes:

• $500,000 pilot program for senators to send out postcards about their town hall meetings
• $30,000 for receptions for foreign dignitaries
• $4 million for consultants
• $15.8 million for salaries for the Senate Appropriations Committee (plus an extra $950,000 for the committee’s administrative expenses)
• 128% budget hike for House office buildings ($84 million)
• 17.8% budget hike for The Architect of the Capitol
• $12.7 million for Government Printing Office technology upgrades
• 4.3% budget hike for (D) Vice President Joe Biden (to $2.5 million)
• 4.3% budget hike for (D) Senator Harry Reid (to $5.2 million)
• 4.3% budget hike for (D) Senator Bob McConnell (to $5.2 million)
• 4.1% budget hike for (D) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (to $5.1 million)
• 3.9% budget hike for (D) Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (to $2.5 million)
• 4.0% budget hike for (R) Minority Leader John Boehner (to $4.5 million)
• 3.7% budget hike for (R) Minority Whip Eric Cantor (to $1.7 million)
• 3.7% budget hike for (D) Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (to $2.2 million)
• 6.2% budget hike for (R) Rep. John Kyl (to $3.3 million)
• 6.2% budget hike for (D) Rep. Dick Durbin (to $3.3 million)

Sen. Ben Nelson’s (D-Neb) spokesman Jake Thompson had the clear unmitigated gall to state:

“This is a fiscally responsible bill.”

So, besides a lot of new debt, what’s in it for us?

[I]t includes language added by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) to force the Senate for the first time to put its expenses online.

Oh, and did I mention–if you don’t vote for it, the government shuts down this month:

With the fiscal year ending Wednesday, Congress needs to pass a short-term, stopgap resolution to keep the government funded through October — and that resolution is included in the legislative appropriations bill, meaning a defeat for the bill could shut the government down.

Hmm, might not be such a bad idea, considering how things are going.

YOU are paying for this

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe Lawrence O’Donnell disclosed three new tax brackets and a 35% punitive tax on private health insurance plans:

[H]alf this legislation is a very big tax bill, a very big tax bill. New forms of taxation that are being invented have never been used before, nobody’s talking about it…

Here’s the video:

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