It is the policy of our government to pay every person who holds or has ever held the office of President or Congressmember for any length of time at all, their full salary for life. To my knowledge, there is no other company or institution which offers such a pension to every former employee. For the vast majority of Americans, if you no longer work for a company, you are no longer paid at all.
The current salary paid to incumbent and retired Presidents and members of Congress averages about $180,000 each, forever after. If the number of them is 535 plus the two in the White House at any given time, and the number on the list of retired former members still alive and receiving that pension was found on a wikipedia entry to be just over ten thousand of them, then the total which would be paid to them annually is just over $1,896,660,000.00. The round-off figure is $2Billion. Dollars. Billion. Annual. That is being paid, presumably from now on, earmarked as a lifetime entitlement, to everybody who has ever been in Congress.
Many in Congress these days are calling for budget cuts, for trimming off the suet, the wasteful, and the undeserving. How about they start this “shared sacrifice” business by putting that up? After all, you have to be a millionaire to begin with just to get that job, don’t you? Many of those in and out of office now receiving that aforementioned $2Billion bucks are people who would let the air out of their own Granny’s wheelchair tires to score a cut that big in the other guy’s budget, or who already have. No? Well, they would sure as hell let the air out of YOUR Granny’s tires, wouldn’t they.
Now to be fair, I know they are only talking about cutting off that fat border-jumping bean-bandit Mammy-granny in her Medibux electric wheelchair going to the Food Stamp office with her five grubby little half-brother booger-biter anchor-babies to get her monthly lobster-fest and whine up some more Oba-Meds to give her worthless dog-pack of deadbeat dads to knock her up again. They are only out to get greedy greasy grannies like her, not YOUR Granny. And they’re doing it to save you taxes, don’t you get it?
A shucks come on now you know that the starting pension at 62 (for six years of service) or 50 for more than six years cannot exceed 80% of the ending salary. I bet that 20% really hurts.
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