Toro
Diamond Member
Among our options the best is to cut government employee pay, pension & benefits in half. Then peg their pay to the private sectors pay. There would be no deficit after that. Then the surplus would pay down the debt. Unless they do this don't even think about raising taxes. I was not born a slave to elitist government workers & I will not die a slave to those corrupt assholes.
I'm sorry. This is just flat out wrong.
The operations of the entire federal government cost about a day and a half's worth of the year's expenditure. Doing what you are suggesting wouldn't make an iota's worth of difference to reduce the deficit. It's a rounding error.
If you want to cut the deficit back into balance, the only way you can do it is to slash social security, medicare and medicaid and defense, since those account for about three quarters of total federal spending. Everything else is just talk.
You are WRONG!
Government employs 18% of the workforce or 23,000,000 employees with an average compensation of $122,000 that cost us $2,806,000,000,000 annually. Cutting their pay in half to equal the private sector would save $1,403,000,000,000 annually. The deficit is only $1,361,291,000,000. That would leave a $41,709,000,000 annual surplus to pay down the debt with every year.
Where do you get your numbers from?
You realize that the entire US budget is $3.7 trillion. If what you said were true, then employee costs would be three quarters of the entire US budget.
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy11/pdf/budget.pdf
Do you really believe this?
Total federal government employment, excluding military personnel, was 2.8 million. That includes part-time employees. There are about 2.3 million non-military employees of the US federal government.
Total Government Employment Since 1962
Compensation to federal employees is about $300 billion a year.
http://www.opm.gov/feddata/html/wypc/2005/2005wypc.pdf
So I was wrong. I said it was a day and a half of budget expenditures. I had previously read a line item on the budget wrong.
Having said that, it still represents 8% of the entire budget. You could eliminate every single government employee and you'd still have a trillion dollar budget deficit.
As you can see, what dominates the federal budget is medicare and medicaid, social security and defense. "Everything else," including government employees, is a quarter of the budget.
So, clearly, you can't balance the budget solely on government employees.
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