Whenever a political decision is made, whether it is to help people through social security or to increase taxes, the bottom line is always money. The question: how much will it cost versus how much can be saved? This is the recent debate since Obama announced a two year pay freeze that would apply to all civilian federal employees, including those who work at the Department of Defense. According to White House officials, this is the first of many difficult decisions that will be made to reducing the nation’s exponentially growing deficit.
Jeffrey Zients, a deputy director at the Office of Management and Budget, projects that the freeze will save more than $5 billion dollars over the course of two years, but helping cut the deficit is only a small portion of this decision. Yes, $5 billion dollars seems like a large amount of money to the average citizen, but what many people do not realize is that our budget deficit is currently exceeding $1 trillion dollars. An exact breakdown of our deficit, as well as how the countries money is being spent in real time, can be found at usdebtclock.org.
What may be the real reason behind the pay freeze would be the midterm election results. The Democrats lost seats in both the House and the Senate, which is never a good sign for the President in office. US citizens were clear in their votes that they were not happy with Washington’s spending, and even something as symbolic as this pay freeze, just shows voters that he was listening.
At the same time, however, the president realizes the impact that it will have on those who are being affected by the pay freeze. Zients said according to the Associated Press, “The president is clearly asking them to make a sacrifice. We believe it is the first of many difficult steps.” As it is now, federal workers only receive a 1.9% increase every year, so over the course of two years they will lose out on a 4% increase. This may not seem like much, but for families having trouble making enough money to support their family, every cent can help.
Yet these federal works are not the first to have their wages frozen. After taking office, Obama also froze salaries of top White House aides, in hopes of doing the same thing. Of course, not everyone has been happy about the idea of a two year pay freeze.
John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, called the decision “a slap at working people.” Gage sees Obama’s actions as only symbolic, and does not believe that working people’s wages are the real issue. He is calling the action a scapegoat for the deficit problem, and does not believe it will actually save us the projected $5 billion dollars that Zients does. Since federal workers only receive a fraction of projected raises, Gage does not think that it is worth hurting these families.
Like many proposed cuts or spending, only time will tell how they will affect the deficit. Hopefully, projections will be correct and it will save the government $5 billion. While it is definitely not going to make a huge dent in the grand scheme of things, any amount will help. The only potential problem with this pay freeze would be if the government decided to spend the money somewhere else. If this happens, then the federal workers would have something to be upset about. Until then, Americans must hope that this will help us in the long run.
