While the Secretary of Defense Gates, said when asked if the U.S. would send more troops to Afghanistan, He would have to evaluate the COST! A Cato report exposes the fact that the bureaucracy that Obama is rapidly expanding within the Federal government has received continuous raises to the point where the pay exceeds the Private sector.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis has released its annual data on compensation levels by industry. The data show that the pay advantage enjoyed by federal civilian workers over private-sector workers continues to expand.
The George W. Bush years were very lucrative for federal workers. In 2000, the average compensation (wages and benefits) of federal workers was 66 percent higher than the average compensation in the U.S. private sector. The new data show that average federal compensation is now more than double the average in the private sector.
In 2008, the average wage for 1.9 million federal civilian workers was $79,197, which compared to an average $49,935 for the nation’s 108 million private sector workers (measured in full-time equivalents). The federal pay advantage (the gap between the lines) is steadily increasing.
The federal advantage is even more pronounced when worker benefits are included. In 2008, federal worker compensation averaged a remarkable $119,982, which was more than double the private sector average of $59,909.
What is going on here? Members of Congress who have large numbers of federal workers in their districts relentlessly push for expanding federal worker compensation. Also, the Bush administration had little interest in fiscal restraint, and it usually got rolled by the federal unions. The result has been an increasingly overpaid elite of government workers, who are insulated from the economic reality of recessions and from the tough competitive climate of the private sector.
It’s time to put a stop to this. Federal wages should be frozen for a period of years, at least until the private-sector economy has recovered and average workers start seeing some wage gains of their own. At the same time, gold-plated federal benefit packages should be scaled back as unaffordable given today’s massive budget deficits. There are many qualitative benefits of government work—such as extremely high job security—so taxpayers should not have to pay for such lavish government pay packages.Source: Cato Institute
So it is more important to our Congressman and Senators to pay their bureaucracy then to provide the troops and weapons to fight in Afghanistan it appears to me!
Gates was quoted as follows in the Atlantic Council web site:
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, "any recommendation for more forces would have to address his concerns that the foreign military presence in Afghanistan could become too large and be seen by Afghans as a hostile occupying force.
"Clearly, I want to address those issues and we will have to look at the availability of forces, we'll have to look at costs. There are a lot of different things that we'll have to look at," he told reporters.
"While there's a lot of gloom and doom going around ... I think we have some assets in place and some developments that hold promise," Gates said on a visit to a Lockheed Martin factory building F-35 fighter jets in Fort Worth, Texas.
Many people who are daily contributed to blogs are young people who have no knowledge or recollection of the disaster that occurred in the Philippines during the first months of World War II.
On Corregior and Bataan the Army defenders ran out of ammunition and were forced to surrender to the attacking Japanese, who took their prisoners on the Bataan Death March!
The Bataan Death March (also known as The Death March of Bataan) took place in the Philippines in 1942 and was later accounted as a Japanese war crime. The 60-mile (97 km) march occurred after the three-month Battle of Bataan, part of the Battle of the Philippines (1941–42), during World War II.
The march, involving the forcible transfer of 75,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war[1] captured by the Japanese in the Philippines from the Bataan peninsula to prison camps, was characterized by wide-ranging physical abuse and murder, and resulted in very high fatalities inflicted upon the prisoners and civilians along the route by the armed forces of the Empire of Japan. Beheadings, cut throats and casual shootings were the more common actions — compared to bayonet stabbings, rapes, disembowelments, numerous rifle butt beatings and a deliberate refusal to allow the prisoners food or water while keeping them continually marching for nearly a week in tropical heat. Falling down or inability to continue moving was tantamount to a death sentence, as was any degree of protest or expression of displeasure.20,000people died during the march! Source:Wikapedia
My purpose of including the preceding narrative of what occurred over 60 years ago, is that if Obama and Congress continue on their path to establish the welfare State of America and ignoring the brave troops who are in Afghanistan, We,in my opinion will have the equivalent of the death march by attrition.Our troops are dying because they are charged with such obtuse orders as giving captured Taliban forces their Amanda rights on the field of battle, and the objective of the Commander of Chief and the Generals in the field are directed to wage a counterinsurgency that protects the population in Afghanistan! Politically correct pieties instead of the command to kill or be killed,and given the troops and munitions are necessary to accomplish the mission in Afghanistan. Or as George Will said in his Post today:"we should withdraw"!
will result in a modern day equivalent of Corregidor and Bataan.
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