2% Raise Solution

[BLUEHAWK]

Lessee, yesterday I think it was, or thereabouts, our national House of Reps (who rep themselves mainly/usually/often I guess?) voted in awarding themselves another 2% salary increase!

Whoopee! Gosh, golly gee buggers! How nice, being able to vote in your own salary increases I mean! Ain't that great America! Gee, I know, they get SO little for all their work, it's a real cryin' shame ain't it. The poor babies just do not have enough to live on.

Lemme see now, the minimum wage worker went from $4.85/hr up to $5.15/hr a few years back... and that got eaten up by taxes, so s/he was no better off, but the government was not worse off.

Some are saying we're in the worst job loss period in recent memory (my town is about to vote in a $350,000,000 corporate welfare tax check to Boeing and American Airlines, after the oil industry went all but bust here). Others say things have never been so good jobs-wise... then there's always NAFTA and GATT, World Bank, IMF, Global Economy, International Community and some other weird economic stuff like ever-so slowly increasing mortgage loan rates (what a surprise!). State by State essential services (like prisons, teachers, fire and police) are having to depend on new taxes (always popular!) or cut-backs, hiring freezes and irregular bowel habits as a fallback position.

So, to fix this our good and honorable president declares that the best way is to reduce government income... while his administration INcreases government spending by 20% (way more than most others in recent memory), more and more of Social Security funds are borrowed on IOUs for operational expenses, the deficit total wobbles around so wildly that nobody seems able to pin it down nor project what it will become, interest due on the national debt exceeds the cost of Defense, balance of trade is not in our favor, and while nobody out there seems able or willing to put a budgetary figure on the projected costs (Hey Guys! Give us a FEEL for it at least!) of our current raft of wars assuming we get ourselves into no more of them! $4,000,000,000, with a B, monthly in Iraq.

What the heck, it's only 2%, right? Aren't we pretty soon talkin' about REAL money here in America!

"If you laid economists end to end, you would still never reach a conclusion"
George Bernard Shaw

Sure cannot run a family thataway folks... surely cannot.