Tag Archives: budget

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Furlough payday. Holy balls. Even when you’ve run the numbers and have a good solid sense of what’s coming, no amount of tinkering around on a spreadsheet really prepares you for Uncle Sam reaching deep into your wallet and financially raping you. Repeatedly. A week ago, I was philosophically opposed to Sequestration and the resultant furlough. With the arrival of my most recent direct deposit, I’ve transition more into a mode of going out to the shed to see if I have a pitchfork and a few torches to spare. It strikes me that if I were alive and in Boston on December 16, 1773, I would have probably been heaving boxes of tea overboard with a smile on my face. It seems that although I don’t particularly like the rabble, I do enjoy rousing them.

2. George. While I would like to thank the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge for naming their offspring in honor of my Tortoise, I am utterly vexed when it comes to understanding why the good people of the United States spent half a dozen days buzzing about it. If we were the United Colonies or a member of the Commonwealth, I could understand being interested in the birth of our President_Barack_Obamafuture head of state, but since we’re citizens and not subjects, I’m at a loss. How many other 30-something couples in the UK had babies this week? How many people in your town had babies? Know how much we all care about them? Yeah. We don’t. I say Godspeed to Wills and Kate, but knowing that they had a baby and that he will sit the throne long after most people alive today have shuffled off the stage is a sufficient report. There’s no need to get our collective nickers in a twist.

3. POTUS. When I hear the president on television talking about growing middle class jobs, increasing spending on education, and generally touting his plan to improve the economy, I only have one thought these days. That thought: WTF? As the head of the executive branch, the president could take one giant step towards improving the plight of the middle class by directing his Secretary of Defense to cancel the administrative furloughs of 650,000 civilian employees. Before he has any credibility on any issue that even tangentially touches on pay, benefits, and employment, the man needs to keep the promises made to the folks already working for him. What I think I understand so far is when large corporations load up on part time employees to keep costs down, it’s evil and wrong, but when the largest agency of the federal government does it it’s a prudent cost savings measure. WTF, Mr. President? WTF?

The worst part…

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The worst part of vacations is that they inevitably come to an end. Maybe if you sat on the beach for a few hours every day it wouldn’t feel like a vacation after 30 years, but I’d be happy to be the test bunny for just such an experiment if anyone out there wants to fund the study. If I thought for a second I could scratch a living out of a combination of writing and being the guy on 27th street who set up beach umbrellas at 9AM and took them down at 5PM, I’d be there in a hot second. Unfortunately, I’m almost positive that I couldn’t manage to get by on a starving college student budget again. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that there isn’t a completely irresponsible voice in the back of my head telling me to say fuck it, sell everything, load up the dogs, the laptop, and whatever else fits into the truck, and head for the coast.

I know everyone has a daydream, but hell, life has got to be about more than sitting in a cube five days a week creating brilliant PowerPoint charts, right? Yeah. So now all I have to do is sell a million books or find someone who wants to pay me $25 an hour plus benefits for setting up umbrellas. Let me know if you’d like to see a resume.

So you were expecting a thank you?

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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.
Duh 2
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.

Quick math…

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I was going some back of the napkin calculating this morning and it looks like I’ve got about half a year’s worth of archive posts left to go. It feels like I’ve been drawing down on that source for a long, long time. I guess I have been leaning on them pretty hard to get Sunday posts up without needing to worry too much about originality. Don’t worry, though, I’m sure when the time comes, I’ll find something to fill that gap in your Sunday mornings. Maybe it’ll be time to recruit a guest blogger so I can continue to have basically one day a week off. We’ll see about that when the time comes.

Since we don’t really need to worry about any of that until closer to the end of the year, I’ll simply direct your attention to the center ring, where this week’s feature presentation highlights the joy of suburban living as well as the run up to Hurricane Dean. While Dean turned out to be a bust for the US, that week was one that opened my eyes for about the way we throw large numbers around without giving it much thought… especially when we’re talking about the budget. Trust me, it only sounds dull. If you knew how often these conversations took place throughout the District, even the most spendthrift among you would have more than a moment of pause.

Without further adue, I present you with the world that was, in mid-August 2007.

A whole lot worse…

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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.

Seeing the forest…

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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.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Last minute discoveries. In an abundance of caution, I reviewed the major book retailers one more time last night and found, to my horror, that there is, in fact, a paperback on the market using my working title almost word for word. It’s not available as an ebook and I guess that’s why I missed it when I was doing my initial research, but there it is sitting on Amazon, priced at $64 and ranked at #3,184,365 in books. To say this sent me into a mild fit is possibly an understatement. So yeah, it’s back to the drawing board for a title.

2. Rent. I’m not a fan of renting. I’m less of a fan when the rent goes up. Sure, I know it’s been the same for two years, but with the real likelihood of needing to slash 20% out of my expenses for the next six months, even a minor increase is going to have an outsized impact. Like businesses everywhere, it means I’ve got to come up with a way to pass that cost on to my customers, because I’m certainly not going to take the hit from my own bottom line. I’m going to pass that rent increase right along to my own renters when their leases expire and thus the circle of pain continues for everyone.

3. Memory. I don’t know if it’s because I’m trying to keep up with a couple dozen things at once or if it’s early onset Alzheimer’s, but I don’t seem to be able to remember a damned thing lately. Writing it down helps, but only when I remember to write it all down in the same place rather than leaving a trail of random Post It notes in my wake. Either my brain needs to get itself in gear and start carrying the load or I need to come up with a better written system to keep it all straight, because right now I’m missing stuff and that makes me crazy.

Concession…

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I made my first concession to the sequestration this morning – I now have a “lunch pail.” I know that doesn’t sound like much of a big deal, but back in the early days of the universe when I was a first year teacher brown bagging lunch every day, I made up my mind that I would officially designate life successful when I could eat lunch somewhere different every day and retire the brown bags. It sounds like a good idea, until you really look at the pesky fact that subs and salads from Wawa are running you a couple of hundred bucks a month. Since the sequester seems like it’s going to hang around for a while, it seems like the better part of valor is to try cutting back the small pleasures to save the bigger ones. Sadly, Wawa’s tasty, tasty sandwiches are probably just the first of many victims of my ruthless sequestration-induced budgetary realignment. No worries about morale when you’ve got a couple of slightly smushed PB&J’s and a warm Diet Coke. War is apparently a bad business to be in when we seem determined to pretend that peace is breaking out all over.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. The IRS. So apparently no one told the IRS that it’s tax season. I mean that’s all I can assume since they haven’t bothered to publish the form you need to fill out if you’re depreciating rental property. If they’re going to set April 14th as the arbitrary annual celebration of screwing the taxpayer with his pants on, the least they can do is make sure to give you all the proper forms so your paperwork can be in order when they do it. I want my money. Asshats.

2. The men and women of the United States Congress. While our friends in Congress have been enjoying their week long sabbatical for Washington’s Birthday, the two million odd federal employees that aren’t Members, have only gotten a week closer to their furlough notice. The difference, of course, being that the Members were paid for their time back in the home district, where as the poor schlubs who decided federal work as a good idea will be going home without pay once a week for the next six months. You’ve got to love a group of people delusional enough to say that taking a pay cut themselves would diminish the dignity of their office while simultaneously telling the people working for them to take a 20% cut and thank them for the opportunity. Since I want to hang on to my soon to be part-time job for a while longer, I’ll refrain from saying how I’d really like to resolve this fiasco.

3. Editing. I love writing. Editing, the handmaiden of writing, is an evil soulless bitch from which there is no hope of escape. In that moment of ecstasy when you think you’ve written something really, really well, Editing shows up and reminds you with swift fury that no, no you didn’t and that it’s time to get back in your hole and write some more… except this time pay attention to grammar, punctuation, style, and usage.