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Too exhausting…
Category Archives: Government & Politics
Federal, State, and Local Government… Taxes, Social Programs, and International Affairs.
So you were expecting a thank you?
Secretary Hagel announced this afternoon that the department was reducing it’s number of planned furlough days for civilians from 14 to 11. That’s down from the original estimate of 22 days they were talking about back in February and March. Judging from the blip of coverage I’ve seen, the media consensus is that defense civilians should be doing cartwheels and singing hosannas at the “good news.” That’s a problem for me.
While it’s true that 14 is better than 22 and 11 is better than 14, I’m not willing to concede the point that any number of furlough days is a “good” thing. In fact it’s bad precedent for the next 9 years of sequestration planning, it’s bad for productivity, and it’s bad for morale. I’m not going to get on the band wagon of a 5% pay cut this year (after 3 years of frozen pay) being a good thing. I’m not lending even the hint of my accepting the idea that this is anything other than a political problem being solved on the backs of a workforce that they’ve already spent three years beating like redheaded stepchildren.
The story we’re being sold is that leadership has “saved” the workforce from the worst effects of the sequester. The reality is that all you’ve done is replace one really shitty course of action with another slightly less really shitty course of action. It’s hard to imagine why I wouldn’t be falling all over myself with gratitude. I wouldn’t thank a mugger because he didn’t take all the cash in my wallet and I’m not going to thank our illustrious leaders for legally doing the same thing. If they were expecting a thank you for their half assed attempt at “leadership,” boy did they come to the wrong place.
A whole lot worse…
For eighteen months, “furlough” and “hiring freeze” are words that continually show up atop the list of search terms that drag people kicking and screaming to my little slice of the internet. Having spent an outlandish amount of time bitching and complaining about both over the last two years, I guess that shouldn’t be much of a surprise. I’d love to tell you all that there’s light at the end of the tunnel and that Uncle Sam’s financial woes are behind him, well, there’s really nothing out there that indicates that’s true at all. From all outward appearances, Uncle has managed to paper over the worst of the problems for the time being. While that seems like a good thing, it probably just means that he’s managed to kick the can further down the road and that when it comes time to settle the tab, it will be even worse than we thought.
By my most recent calculation, I’ve worked under a hiring freeze of one sort or another for about a third of my career. I’m not feeling the pinch at the moment because I’m not actively looking for an eject button, but if I was options would be pretty limited. Having personally experienced the fresh hell of sending out multiple hundreds of resumes to get a handful of interviews, I don’t envy anyone looking for fresh horizons under the latest incarnation of the freeze. Even more unfortunate, I don’t see the market thawing any time soon, either.
Uncle has been warning about employee furloughs for months now. The general public reacted badly to the notion of laying off food inspectors and air traffic controllers, two very visible activities carried out by random, faceless bureaucrats. I have my doubts if there’s going to be the same outcry for defense workers. Working behind the wire, most of the public will never see or know what we do on a daily basis. As a result, us staying home for a week or a month isn’t something they see or experience firsthand. That makes us easy to ignore and therefore an excellent target of opportunity for cost reduction or avoidance.
So far, the department’s official position, at least the one that it’s opted to communicate to the workforce, seems to be ignoring the issue and hoping it goes away… at least that’s what it looks like from the inside. Predictions range from “nothing’s going to happen” to having to take the full 22-day furlough within the last 3 months of the fiscal year. Someone at echelons higher than reality probably has the smattering of a plan, but for the time being the drones are being kept well insulated from anything that resembles official information.
As we grind towards the end of fiscal year 2013, I think we’ll come through with minimal disruptions. What no one is talking about yet, and what I’m convinced is going to bight us all in the ass is that sequestration is a ten year event. Even if we ride out year one with cost savings through attrition and quietly cooking the books, we’ve still got nine years of draconian cost savings to generate…and in my mind that means things are going to get a whole lot worse in the out years before they ever start getting better.
Red menace…
It’s May Day. Maybe I know that because I majored in history or maybe it’s because I was a geeky kid who remembers the last days of the Red menace pretty clearly. In either case, May 1st use to be a big deal. Unionists, hippies, malcontents, communists, and leftists of every stripe flocked to it once upon a time. 
Maybe they still do and we just don’t see many news reports about the really radical lefties anymore. Maybe there aren’t enough of the old school radicals left to make it news. Your guess is as good as mine.
Either my happenstance or because my subconscious really runs the show, I ended up wearing a red shirt to work today. Lord knows I’m no socialist and hippies, as a group, tend to make me nervous, but to me May Day is still a Soviet holiday – one that brings back childhood memories of the news covering the USSR parading their latest and greatest hardware through Moscow to Red Square. I was 11 when the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union was lowered from the top of the Kremlin for the last time. Most kids that age probably wouldn’t remember where they were when they saw it happening live on television, but I do.
I’m a good enough historian to know that how we view past events is always flavored by the tenor of the times in which we live. As far as I’m concerned, there is no such thing as truly “objective” history. We always bring our personal biases and backgrounds into the analysis despite trying to avoid it. So here we are on May Day 2013, I’m wearing my red shirt, and I find myself missing the USSR. Sure, they were an oppressive expansionist empire based on an economic system that proved completely unsustainable, but they were at least the kind of enemy you grudgingly respect. Today’s petty thugs and tyrants could learn a lot from giving them a look.
A taxing case of hypotheticals…
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a fan of tax-free shopping on the internet. Of course I know that theoretically I’m supposed to self-report and pay Maryland state sales taxes due on the items I purchase, but… Yeah. I’m going to invoke the 5th Amendment and not discuss the particulars of what I may or may not do.
As a Republican, I should probably be up in arms about this “new” tax, but as a Constitutionalist, it’s pretty well established (i.e. expressly written) that the Congress has every right to fiddle with interstate commerce as it sees fit. As much as I wish it otherwise, my reading of the tea leaves is that the collection of state income taxes by internet retailers is going to become a fact of life sooner rather than later. Do I like it? No, of course not. Am I going to gird myself for battle against it? No, not so much. I’ve got limited brain power and limited time to dedicate to causes and this isn’t going to become part of the long list of the windmills I enjoy tilting at from time to time.
If I were a good patriot who disagrees with state and federal tax policy, I’d hypothetically vote with my dollars – and have as many hypothetical major purchases as possible shipped for in store pickup in Delaware, where at least for the time being can hypothetically continue to avoid onerous state sales taxes and excessive commercial regulation. Of course if I were really to take by business out of state, I’d obviously file the appropriate quarterly tax forms with the Comptroller of Maryland in accordance with whatever batshit crazy laws the legislature has passed.
The nightmare scenario…
Here in ‘Murica, we have a tendency to think in terms of big disasters: earthquakes, hurricanes, pandemic flu, and briefcase nukes. Those are the kind of events that get big attention and the corresponding big dollars poured into planning what to do when one of those things happens. For years, the nightmare scenario has been a hurricane slamming into the Big Easy (been there, done that), a mid-west earthquake that cripples transportation across swath of the country from Chicago to Memphis, or a non-descript dirty bomb left at Union Station our outside the Smithsonian. Those are still the official nightmare scenarios, but they’re not my personal nightmare.
Compared to radiological bombs and the weather, my personal nightmare is decidedly low tech. It’s ten suicide bombers in ten separate cities walking into ten coffee shops at 8:30 in the morning of a random Tuesday and blowing themselves to hell. It’s the kind of improvised devices we saw in Boston – easy enough that just about anyone can manufacture one with stuff they already have around the house. It’s not the kind of terror that’s going to bring down entire buildings, but let them start going off in shopping malls and restaurants across downtown America, and watch how fast the public clamors for something, anything that ratchets down the body count. How long would it be before we nationally agree to be searched at any time for any reason or to having our cars inspected before being allowed into a parking garage or to give up any number of our essential freedoms?
Suicide bombs and improvised explosives have become a way of life in places like Israel, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Adopting a bunker mentality when you spend every day under threat is a perfectly natural response to those outside forces acting on you, but I don’t want that for America. I don’t want to live in a garrison town where I’ve traded a lot of personal freedom for a nominal amount of safety. That’s my real nightmare scenario and one that we can only avoid through eternal vigilance. That’s the price we’re going to have to pay – the price we’ve always paid – for liberty.
But not the others…
One of the worst arguments I’ve seen repeatedly in the gun control debate over the last six months almost always goes along the lines of: Well, you have to have a license to drive a car, so why not a license to own a gun? The thing is, the Constitution does not specifically address your right to transportation – by car, horse and buggy, train, air, slow boat, or on foot. Ownership of a car does not require licensure or permission from the state or federal government. If a 15 year old has the coin in his pocket (and his parent’s permission as a minor), he can buy and possess any car on the lot. Licensing drivers conveys the privilege to operate the car on the roads, not the “right” to own it in the first place.
Since gun ownership is a right defined by the Constitution, the more analogous argument would be in requiring a state and or federal license to speak publically. Since words are so often used to bully people and that bullying directly results in emotional and physical harm up to and including suicide, before someone is allowed to exercise their “right to free speech,” they should be required to take a four hour word safety course and obtain a license from their state indicating that they understand how harmful words can be. Perhaps we should also extend the licensing requirement to the right to vote, since elections, too, have real world consequences. In order to exercise your vote as a citizen, you should be required to show identification and pass an exam showing a minimum proficiency and understanding of the issues of the day. Since we’re free to abridge one constitutionally protected right, there’s no reason we shouldn’t be equally free to abridge the others in order to make the world a safer, more harmonious place.
As much as I hate to say it, for me it’s not a pro-gun/anti-gun position that’s the real issue here. I would be every bit as apoplectic if the state and federal government were trying to restrict the other right that I enjoy as a free citizen of the United States of America. The right to keep and bear arms is just the one that the powers that be have decided to come after first. I’m a good enough student of history to know that once one right falls, the others are all the more endangered. I don’t think I’ll ever come to terms with how people can love some freedoms, but not the others.
Seeing the forest…
We had an awkward conversation at the office this morning. One of the most popular discussions happening around almost every one of Uncle Sam’s conference room tables these days is what the forced cuts of the sequester are going to mean for the job and for the individual employees. Since the almost universal answer is no one really knows yet, these conversations usually end in a great gnashing of teeth and another hour gone down the tubes. I’m pretty sure I know what those at echelons higher than reality are thinking though – that if they just plan hard enough, they can still figure out how to cram 40 hours of work into a legislatively-imposed 32 hour workweek.
In trying to account for and occupy every second of those 32 hours, they’re missing the broader point that in addition to the eight hours a week of “lost” time, people are also going to be using their sick and annual leave allotments just as they would under a 40-hour week – except now they’re using it over a shortened week, dramatically compressing the number of days available when leave can be taken. If pushed, I’d make an educated guess that a one-fifth reduction in the work week will actually result in the average office being staffed at somewhere between 50-60 percent on any given day during the furlough period.
If you want a crash course in my logic, here it goes: My personal observation is that on any given work day, about 15% of the total workforce is out of the office on some kind of approved leave. All other factors staying equal, with the sequester furlough (20%) and the use of leave (15%) 35% of the available pool of employees will be unavailable for work. Add in another 5% of the time when immoveable objects like mandatory training take place and you’re into the 40% unavailable range… So while the official talk is about a 20% reduction in work and the activities that will slow down and stop as a result of it, I tend to think someone is being rather optimistic. The real impact is going to be much closer to leaving only 60-65% of time available to actually get the job done.
Compile other intangibles like steadily declining morale, pay that’s likely to be frozen for at least three years, and general worry about being able to meet simple obligation like rent, food, and other expenses, with the direct negative effects of the sequester furlough, and you’ve got a recipe for intensely negative performance across the board. The problem, as far as I can tell, is no one is seeing the second and third order effects of this forest because the trees are so damned close. The media and certain elements on the Hill are fond of pointing out that the sequester hit and nothing happened. Those wheels are in motion and sooner rather than later the real impacts are going to start making themselves felt. That’s when the hard decisions are going to get made about what tasks get done day-to-day and which get tossed over the side for lack of time to do them… and that’s going to be when the real awkward conversations start.
Big Mac…
As it turns out, Doug MacArthur was right. We should have gone right ahead and pummeled North Korea into submission in the early 1950s and skipped over the last 60 years of them becoming increasingly batshit crazy. In the 50s it would have been socially acceptable to lob a few nukes at them, throw the Chinese back across the Yalu, and unify the Korean peninsula under the democratically elected government of the south. Today we have to send them grain and beg them for a chance to “talk it out.” Hindsight is a real pain in the ass, like that.
Big Mac, Curtis LeMay, George Patton, and even Colin Powell knew how to handle the kind of situation that results from your enemy declaring that they are no longer bound by the terms of a ceasefire… you destroy them with massive and overwhelming force. But we live in a civilized world now, where it’s impolite to even make that kind of suggestion for fear of being labeled a war monger or worse.
North Korea is a mess… and not the kind that’s going to be fixed by a shipload of food and asking them to sit down for tea in Panmunjom. But since our leaders don’t seem capable of even making sensible domestic decisions, my expectation of them being able to make the hard calls on the international stage is almost nonexistent. So instead of making the world just a little safer for democracy we’ll go for round 487 of the DPRK behaving badly and getting rewarded for its trouble.
Sometimes I just don’t see the point in being a superpower anymore.
Just the parts you like…
I’m about to break ranks with Fox News, and you know that gives me a slightly queazy feeling on the inside. Still, I’ve made a habit of calling a spade a spade with everything else that ends up on my mind, so it’s only fair to call out your friends when they’re being asshats too. For the last six months or so, Fox News commentators have been screaming for the administration to cut government spending… except for Defense. And the FAA. And Homeland Security. And Border Patrol. Look, I’m a registered republican and draw a salary from one of the departments that you’re supporting, so I have a vested interested in being a defense sector booster but I know well and good there’s plenty of room to cut if it’s done smartly (i.e. not through an across the board cut as currently provided for by law and certainly not just by lopping off a work day every week for the next six months).
For the last two days, though, where Fox has decided to make a stand is on the subject of White House tours. Seriously? Guided tours of the White House are apparently so vital to the long term health and welfare of the republic that they should be included on the list of items to be fully funded… It’s so important that it ranks right up along with funding the troops still fighting in Afganistan. You have got to be shitting me, Fox.
Oh, you say, it only saves $75,000 a week. It’s a drop in the spending bucket. And you’re right. It’s one drop. A drop that over the six months of this years round of sequestration would save $1.65M of the $24M you say the White House must cut from their budget. That one drop is a pretty good start.
Sorry folks, but the need to cut spending isn’t about what programs you like, or I like, or the sixth grade class from East Pignuckle, Louisiana likes. It’s about reducing spending in accordance with the laws that Congress passes and the president signed into law. If it’s a bad law, it’s only bad because that’s the way some jackwagon staffer on the Hill wrote it.
I’ll be the first to tell you that the way sequestration was written, it’s just about the dumbest piece of legislation I’ve ever personally seen become law of the land. But the national consensus was that we want to reduce spending. Guess what? That means some of the things that people like just aren’t going to get done anymore. You wanted smaller government? Just remember that smaller government looks like fewer tours, fewer soldiers, slower refund processing, and generally less of everything we’ve become accustomed to over the last 60 years. If you don’t like what it looks like now that smaller government is here, push to change the law, don’t just sit around bitching about what you’ve lost. The future is about priorities and if you’re not speaking up for yours, someone else will be happy to let their voice be heard.
JEFFREYTHARP.COM 