Trump's budget request slashes retirement benefits for 2 million federal workers

[babylonsister]

Trump’s budget request slashes retirement benefits for 2 million federal workers
Each federal worker would lose about $75,000 in retirement savings.
By Alexia Fernández Campbell@[e-mail] Mar 12, 2019, 4:40pm EDT


President Donald Trump’s grand vision for America in 2020 can be summarized this way: spend billions more dollars on the US military and immigration enforcement; cut billions of dollars from the social safety net. And do nothing to close the $1 trillion deficit Republicans created with their 2017 corporate tax cuts.

The president’s 2020 budget proposal, which he released Monday, managed to anger everyone from retirees to childhood cancer researchers. It also angered millions of federal employees and retired government workers, who would see their pensions cut under the president’s budget request.

Randy Erwin, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees labor union (NFFE), blamed Trump for trying to make federal workers pay for the 2017 tax cuts, which disproportionately benefited the wealthiest Americans.

“President Trump again sacrifices the middle-class families on behalf of the wealthy through his proposed pay freeze and needless cuts to earned benefits for federal workers,” Erwin said in a statement released Monday. “We saw during the 35-day shutdown earlier this year that many federal workers live paycheck to paycheck.”

The proposal would cancel cost-of-living increases to pension income for retirees in one program, and would lower the annual adjustment to another pension program by 0.5 percent. The budget also scraps certain retirement benefits for employees who stop working before they are eligible for Social Security.

Current federal employees would also end up paying more for their retirement benefits, without getting anything in return.

All in all, the president wants to cut $148.9 billion from employee pensions in the next decade — roughly $75,000 per federal worker, according to NFFE. And it’s not a small workforce, either: The US government is the largest employer in the country, with 2.1 million civilian employees. The vast majority of them live outside the Washington, DC, area.

more...

https://www.vox.com/2019/3/12/18261739/trump-budget-2019-federal-workers

[smirkymonkey]

1. This is an outrage!

How can any middle class or working class person possibly think that he is on their side? He is not only not on their side, he is hostile toward anyone who is not part of the 1% and makes no effort to hide it.

Yet, the true believers still think that he is going to make them rich. Arghhhhhh! I am so angry and disgusted I just want to scream at the top of my lungs right now!