What economic problems?
Ya know how folks are always saying that the only reason recruitment and reenlistments are so high in the military is because there’s a bad economy and fewer job opportunities – so the military doesn’t need to pay retention bonuses? In fact, retention bonuses were the first thing that Murtha targeted last December when he started looking at military budget cuts.
With an unemployment rate reaching 10%, Congress feels the need to pay bonuses to their aides, though according to Stephen Dinan of the Washington Times;
A month after they voted to punish some corporate executives for taking hefty bonus payouts, members of the House of Representatives quietly gave their own staffers a new potential bonus by making even their top-earning aides eligible for taxpayer dollars to repay their student loans.
The change, which took effect in May, means House employees earning up to $168,411, or the top level, are now eligible for government-funded subsidies to help pay down their student loans.
House officials defend the change as a job-related benefit necessary to keep the government competitive in the hiring market – the same argument corporate chieftains used to defend their own pay scales.
Can you imagine how tough it must be to make those college loan payments on a meager $188k pay check? It’s no wonder Congress thinks that people making $65k need government health care.
But I guess Congress keeping some drone to fetch their over-priced coffee employed is more important than keeping that trigger-pulling buck sergeant whose troops would follow him into the bowels of Hell and back.
Category: Congress sucks
I can’t say that this surprises me one bit. After all, isn’t this the same John Murtha whom threw the Haditha Marines under the bus.
FYI: those jobs are fought over, tooth and nail, to the tune of multiple hundreds of applicants for every opening–needless to say, the last thing they need is bonuses to keep those jobs filled.
Jonn, you should know how hard it is to get a staffer who can get a latte order straight. Or, how to get a congressperson in and out of a restaurant without having to deal with a constituent. And get the reservations right….
It’s what they do, and damn it, they’re important. Sarc/off
“With an unemployment rate reaching 10%” Remove the magic math and the lies by the O’Dumbo monkeys and the true unemployment rate is over 16%.
Scrapiron hits true in the black. the Dems are still using that “new math” to pad their stats. Up here in Maine, it’s more like 1 in 5 among all the folks I know.
How about this?
Government sent 3,900 economic stimulus checks to prison inmates — 2,200 got to keep them
Prison inmates are generally ineligible for federal benefits. However, 2,200 of the inmates who received checks got to keep them because, under the law, they were eligible, said Mark Lassiter, a spokesman for the Social Security Administration. They were eligible because they weren’t incarcerated in any one of the three months before the recovery package was enacted.
“The law specified that any beneficiary eligible for a Social Security benefit during one of those months was eligible for the recovery payment,” Lassiter sai
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Stimulus-checks-not-boosting-apf-2542694170.html?x=0&.v=2
I hear tonight on the telley that the Weather Underground has been mainstreamed. They helped write the Stimulus bill. And Van Jones, an avowed communist and anarchist and convicted felon, is the 0’s Czar on “green jobs”. How appropriate, a communist appointed to be a czar in the Obama administration. So, who can be surprised that the feds would blow a few mil on staff bonuses, or convicted felons?
And to go along with Tim, unemployment is about 1 in 5 here in Michigan, too.
That’s disgusting…and the general public has no friggin’ clue.
Anybody remember the Nixon recession in ’73? I do. It is when I enlisted in the Navy.
Of a HS class of 261, six of us went into the Armed Forces, three Army, one Air Force, and two of us the Navy. Of those, one was a girl who joined the Army. I have the distinction of being the only one who stayed in. I didn’t go in because of the economy, I had a job and was still living at home. It was just over a year since graduating from HS. I did it to get out of there and go to sea. Plain, pure and simple.
That being said, when I arrived at RTC San Diego at the end of September of ’73, the Receiving and Orientation Barracks was over capacity. There were a large number of new recruits who did join because of the economy. And it was the first full year of the all volunteer force and the pay had gone up considerably since our dads, older brothers and older cousins were in.
Perhaps old scumbag murtha should do some more fact checking, like show up at the basic training facility and ask each kid why he or she joined.