Trump Cuts Scheduled Federal Pay Raise, Citing "Serious Economic Conditions" in the Country

[CatWoman]

In public, President Donald Trump likes to boast about—and usually inflate—the performance of the American economy on his watch. He picks through the numbers to take credit for everything good and sorts out everything not-so-good for dumping on his predecessors. The result: lots of exclamation points!

Link to tweet

?s=20

If you lived in a bubble where Twitter Trump was your sole news source, you’d be pretty fired up, which makes it odd that on Monday the very same Trump White House said it intends to slash a scheduled pay raise for civilian federal employees. Cutting the 2.5 percent raise set for 2021 to 1 percent for millions of federal workers seems a bit austere in the face of such self-proclaimed boom times. Even more absurdly, Trump is justifying ordering the cut on the grounds that the country is in the midst of a “national emergency or serious economic conditions affecting the general welfare,” which the White House says authorizes the president to “implement alternative plans for pay adjustments.”

So which is it? The best economy in the history of economies or a national economic emergency? Either way, somebody’s lying.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/trump-cuts-scheduled-federal-pay-raise-serious-economic-conditions.html?fbclid=IwAR20jkiA4ndWb61FY5LNRALFB2FAvocsQ-Xry9BRBklbeNk4R5lSdiub9uM

[spanone]

1. K&R...

[Rider3]

2. Golf

He has a big golf bill to pay off. Got to make cuts somewhere.

[redwitch]

4. That's just silly!

You know he doesn’t pay for anything.

[Kaiserguy]

13. The only golf bill is the one we get

since the Secret Service has to pay for all sorts of different items every time they go to a Trump Shithole Resort. It's a money maker for Trump and a big ripoff for us.

[bluestarone]

3. Need money for the farmers?

Wake up people.

[ProudMNDemocrat]

5. "But the Stock Market is up because of ME!"

Which is how Trump measures the strength of the economy.....Look at the Dow Jones!

Main Street is not benifitting. Trump LIES continue.

When are people going to wake up?

[Vinca]

6. And the stock market went up more under Obama, but according to the King

that was a terrible economy.

[gratuitous]

12. Some online troll pulled that crap on me

So I went back and checked the Dow Jones numbers at Obama's first inaugural and Trump's inaugural, and compared the respective increases of each administration from that date to the same date. If the Trump stock market had done as well as the Obama stock market, the DJIA would be up over 34,000 right now. Instead, it's running about 29,500.

I didn't hear back from the troll.

[tanyev]

7. Oh, those 'serious economic conditions' that just popped up out of nowhere

and have absolutely nothing to do with one Donald Jackass Trump?

[nature-lover]

8. In his addled brain, anyone who is not a corporate magnate is just a slacker and isn't deserving.

[COLGATE4]

9. Those massive tax cuts for millionaires and

billionaires aren't going to pay for themselves.

[Liberal In Texas]

10. He means of course that it's the best for the rich.

This is a typical repub strategy to weaken the services the federal government provides to us common folk. The idea is if people don't think the government can do it, when they pitch "privatizing" it won't seem like such a bad idea.

[Ligyron]

21. Yup, cut, cut, cut and then harp on the resulting mess. "See, government sucks.It's the Democrats!!"

[Proud Liberal Dem]

11. Wasn't he just at SOTU last week heralding his "beautiful" economy that he is stewarding?

but.........it's not good enough to give federal employees better raises?

[ffr]

14. It doesn't add up

does it?

Our economy is on the brink of disaster and it's due to the KGOP's deficit spending, which has gone up 34% from 2018. The only thing keeping the stock market rolling is subsidized government red ink. If interest rates go up 1 point, the annual deficit will skyrocket by $240 billion.

The balloon is going to pop!

[maxsolomon]

15. Incentivize leaving government

by squeezing pay.

Bannon cheers.

[ancianita]

16. Jackal tactics from the lead jackal. More votes against him from all the gopers in his administratio

[samplegirl]

17. This affects us personally

If my husband gets no pay raises. I mean really when you not on the highest of pay scales anyway! My husband started his job at ODOT at 6 years ago after losing his factory job of 30 years!
Maybe we should just quit paying our taxes like trump!
Tired of being pinched!
My husband works all kinds of hours plowing weekends and his pay scale is nowhere near what he use to make!
I’m so tired of trump and his wrecking ball!
If Obama would of increased the deficit like trump he would of been impeached!

[Moostache]

22. If Obama gave an Inaugural Address like Trump did, they would have tried to lynch him on the Mall..

There is literally nothing that Trump has done in his time in office that the GOP hypocrites and liars would not have tried to imprison or execute Obama for the EXACT. SAME. THINGS.

The duplicity and outright lying is too much for me...I hate them all for a multitude of reasons, but this makes it easier too.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

18. $2 Trillion tax giveaway to the 1% is serious economics. . . . nt

[superpatriotman]

19. Nearly able to 'drown in a bathtub'

Conservative think tanks and privateers are having their salad days

[C Moon]

20. The GOP doesn't want the best USA economy in history.

The like to say that (to get elected), but they don't want it. They want all the money to be at the top, and the rest of the U.S. to suffer poorer lifestyles.

[Mr. Ected]

23. He just handed Dem candidates a juicy factoid to hammer home

Any Trump mention of a great economy simply needs to be rebutted by his own official statement to the contrary.

[SunSeeker]

24. He hates actual public servants. nt

[FM123]

26. Bingo!

[coti]

36. He's working for Russia. nt

[SunSeeker]

38. Yes, and Putin hates those pesky people serving the US public too.

Public servants have shown a habit of blowing the whistle on Trump's pro-Russian treachery. Putin and Tump don't like that.

[struggle4progress]

25. "Best economy ever! But it's so bad, we can't give anybody a pay raise!

Tax cuts for the wealthy so they can play the stocks! And trillion dollar deficits leaving your children mountains of debt!"

[cbdo2007]

27. This is a perfect Dem campaign commercial

It's weird that he would do this in an election year when he could just add it to the deficit with no consequences.

[Captain Zero]

28. He thinks the US Treasury is his money and

Remember there was one employee of his in NYCity who said the most difficult thing to get him to do every year was to sign the Christmas/Holiday Bonus Checks. She said every year she had to go to him 3-4 times before he would do it.
Stingy Donald Scrooge

That's exactly what this is...

[bucolic_frolic]

29. Is there a "serious economic conditions" discount at the grocery store?

Do you just say, "Trump sent me!"?

[LastLiberal in PalmSprings]

30. After the bullshit with the Ego Wall, Fat Donnie learned if he declares a "national emergency"

he can do whatever he wants, even transfer money from the military to his pet project. In this case he claims the country is in a "national economic emergency." First time I've ever heard that term--even real economists don't use it. Of course, "Nobody knows more about economics than me. Only I can fix it, believe me!"

Add to that a compliant GOP senate who just gave him a license to steal, and we can expect a massive shift of government funds into the pockets of his big supporters and of course the Grifter-in-Chief himself.

[Iliyah]

31. The wall is cheaply made . ..

They are pocketing monies.

Everyday the illegal person in the WH along with his cronies are pissing Americans off. Each day.

[intheflow]

40. And also pissing away our taxpayer dollars. n/t

[wnylib]

32. There is more to this than economics.

Sure, he is contradicting himself on the economy. It is not as secure as he claims it is, and its growth is not all to his credit. He inherited a recovering economy on the upswing due to Obama, after R's trashed it with 'trickle on' economics and caused the Great Recession. But it also is not bad enough to claim national emergency in order to cancel raises. He wants to get rid of experienced employees whom he sees in the way of his tactics. They know what normal is supposed to be. They are loyal to the job and the system. He wants absolute loyalty to him.

More disturbing to me is the justification of national emergency that he is claiming in order to evoke presidential powers to override a planned and approved raise. He is setting the stage to proclaim other emergency powers, to invoke them whenever he wants to override the system, the laws, and, eventualky, the people when we protest.

Beware. He will invoke emergency powers in other cases soon. I expect him to use the trumped up story of being the victim of a political coup attempt, first through the Mueller investigation, and then through the impeachment. This will be his excuse for trying to silence opposition through investigations, possibly followed by charges and kangaroo trials.

[Skittles]

41. excellent analyisis, wnylib

yes indeed

[wnylib]

42. Not hard to recognize. it's the pattern of

autocrats and dictators in taking over a democratic form of government. Create or declare a national emergency to justify expansion of personal power and persecution of the opposition. It's been done before. Reichstag fire comes to mind.

On a lesser scale, and in my lifetime, there were the Nixonian crackdowns on protests due to violence. But in many cases, the protests were peaceful until COINTEL agents who infiltrated the protests, incited violence themselves. That gave them justification to arrest people, use clubs, and at Kent State, bullets. It gave an aura of illigality and danger to protests in order to intimidate people from joining them. The official position was that "decent" people did not engage in such actions. I am convinced that the 1968 riots in Chicago at the Dem convention were instigated by COINTEL infiltrators to smear Dems with a negative public image. The response from Mayor Daly, a Dem, did not help.

I remember, in 1976, as Indepence Day approached, with everyone anticipating grand celebrations for the 200th anniversary, a supervisor told me that he expected "anti-American troublemakers" to cause riots across the country. I told him that protesters were very pro-American and appreciated the anniversary more than most people because they believed in the country enough to act on its principles. (There were no riots.)

[Skittles]

43. oh I go way back too

I remember reading about Kent State in The Stars and Stripes and checking to make sure they were really talking about AMERICA - it felt unbelievable to me.

[wnylib]

44. I lived in PA then, a couple hours' drive

from Kent, OH. The shootings occurred on a Monday. A friend of mine was a Kent student. She told me later that the atmosphere on campus was so tense by Friday night that she went home on Saturday because she "just knew" it would get worse. She had already experienced one protest riot before that. Once she was home, her parents would not let her go back for Monday classes due to news reports over the weekend about growing tension between students and police. So she was at home when the shootings occurred.

She knew some of the wounded and one of the killed students. She never returned.

My brother was career Navy and rather conservative (the only R in the family). While he was home on leave over the summer, after overseas duty, he said he could not believe how protesters were treated, to the point of shooting at them. He said the reason the military existed was to protect the rights and freedoms of our citizens and that included the right to protest, whether we agreed with them or not.

If you remember, those shootings were a turning point in public opinion about the war. Don't remember now who it was, but some well known person at the time said, "My God. We're killing our own children here at home. It's got to stop."

[Skittles]

45. I do remember the change in tone towards the war

even the most gung ho folk started to sour on it

[Crunchy Frog]

33. Just part of his war against the "deep state". n/t

[coti]

35. I.e., he's trying to weaken our country. Because that's what Putin wants.

Not even Grover Norquist would do shit like this.

[coti]

34. He's fucking working for Russia. There is NO other explanation for this. nt

[mike_c]

37. is this the same country...

...that's enjoying the greatest economy in history?

[Warpy]

39. Yeah, you smug, America hating sack of feces

Those conditions were caused by your reckless, unnecessary, and ultimately disastrous tax cutting for members of your rich man's club.