Venango County Tea Party Patriots

A non-partisan, non-profit, non-member, association dedicated to educating the public and promoting the principles of fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government and free market economics, and all other lawful activities.

fiscal cliff

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Head of Federal Employee’s Union Not Satisfied With 1% Raise

The president of the American Federation of Government Employees says a one-percent increase is “absolutely unconscionable.”

The head of the largest federal employee union said Saturday that President Obama’s proposal to increase pay for federal employees by 1 percent was “absolutely unconscionable” and “simply not enough.”

“It is not enough to allow federal employees to make up lost ground from two-plus years of frozen pay. It is not enough to allow workers, most of whom earn very modest salaries ranging from $24,000 to $70,000, to maintain living standards. And it is not enough to send a message with any kind of clarity that the administration values the federal workforce and doesn’t believe it should continue to bear an enormously disproportionate share of deficit reduction,” David Cox Sr., the president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), said in a statement.

The White House told labor leaders of the proposed increase in the 2014 fiscal year budget in a phone call late Friday night. That raise would come on top of the half-point pay hike, scheduled to take effect in late March, which has been delayed as part of the “fiscal cliff” deal struck last month.  Federal salaries have been frozen since 2011.

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Still Headed Towards a Fiscal Cliff

Obama lately has acted as though most of the work has already been done to get the debt problem under control. At a recent press conference, he claimed that he’s already cut long-term deficits by $2.5 trillion and that “closing some additional loopholes (and) doing some additional cuts” are all that’s needed to cross the finish line.

But the latest CBO report shows that the country is far from out of the woods. In fact, despite the supposed budget cuts and the $620 billion in tax hikes Obama brags about, deficits start climbing every year after 2015, reaching back up to $978 billion by 2023.

Debt, too, starts expanding again as a share of GDP, climbing to 77% by 2023, with no end in sight.

Even that grim outlook is unrealistic. The CBO’s forecast assumes, for example, that Congress will let scheduled huge cuts in Medicare payments to doctors go through, even though they haven’t done so for years.

It assumes ObamaCare’s costs don’t explode, despite increasing evidence to the contrary. And it assumes there’s no recession anytime in the next decade and that interest rates remain reasonably low.

The CBO also makes it abundantly clear that the cause of this crisis is out-of-control spending, not insufficient tax revenues.

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US Debt Headed to 200 Percent of GDP

The nation’s long-term fiscal outlook hasn’t significantly improved following the recent agreement between Congress and the White House over tax and spending issues, according to a new analysis.

The “fiscal cliff” deal, combined with the debt-limit agreement of August 2011, only slightly delays the United States reaching debt-to-gross domestic product levels that would damage the economy and risk another fiscal crisis, according to a report from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation released on Tuesday.

The agreement “may have prevented the immediate threats that the fiscal cliff posed to our fragile economic recovery, but we haven’t remotely fixed the nation’s debt problem,” said Michael A. Peterson, president and COO of the Peterson Foundation.

“The primary goal of any sustainable fiscal policy is to stabilize the debt as a share of the economy and put it on a downward path, and yet our nation is still heading toward debt levels of 200 percent of GDP and beyond,” he said.

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