The whigning and wringing of hands over the fact that a shitload of federal employees won’t get paid tomorrow…I mean…
You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh and laugh and laugh.
Do you know what it meant to be a federal employee back before federal employee unions were legalized?
Does the fact that some federal employees once had PX privileges at Army bases tell you anything?
Does the fact that entire businesses were created exclusively to serve federal employees? Ever hear of Fedco? How about GEICO? USAA?
Fedco is the acronym for “Federal Employees Distributing Company”. A $10 lifetime membership got you into this proto-Costco, a non-profit consumer’s cooperative, that was created by 800 US Post Office employees, to “leverage their buying power by purchasing goods directly from wholesalers, and eliminate the additional markup of a retail store.” Why did they do that? The Wikipedia article doesn’t say, but I’ll fill in the blanks: In 1948, when Fedco started, federal employee salaries sucked. The Fedco co-op was a way for those employees to save money by buying at wholesale as a group.
GEICO, that annoying insurance company with the gecko spokesman? Government Employees Insurance Company. Founded in 1936 to provide affordable auto insurance to government employees. It didn’t start insuring the general public until 1974.
USAA, the United Services Automobile Association, same thing. Founded by 25 US Army officers in 1922 as a mutual self-insurance company for army personnel, who generally had problems obtaining auto insurance because they were deemed “high-risk”. While it did offer some limited civilian products for a few years (2009-2013), and certain federal law enforcement and foreign service people have been considered eligible in the past, their current market is really focused on the serving military and their immediate families. (USAA also does banking services, and they are really pissing people off right now during the current fedgov shutdown, in which they aren’t offering to float members’ checks like they have done in past shutdowns, and are offering only a one-time loan that’s being refused to even high-credit score customers.)
All of these companies (and probably others) began life because federal employees used to be POOR. They were paid like shit, like the military still is. It wasn’t until federal employee unions were legalized — something that both FDR and JFK, contrary to the fact that they were liberal Democrats, inveighed against — that federal salaries started to rise to equity with private salaries, and of course, quickly overtook them and drove right on past to the point where federal employees are often the best paid (some would say most overpaid) people in the country.
While I don’t begrudge a full-time employee of any business or industry a living wage, federal employees are a different type of animal. They are public servants, or are supposed to be. A fedgov job should not mean a life of luxury in the DC suburbs. In most cases it probably shouldn’t even be a career, given that most of the bureaucracy is a horrific taxpayer burden at best and unConstitutional on its face at its worst. But I digress.
Fedgov employees, by and large, have been living off the fat of the land for a long time. You’d think at some point they would have considered living modestly and putting some of that fat away for the hard times. How many times has the government been shut down in the past couple of decades? The very election of Donald Trump, who was elected on a platform of draining the swamp, should have been a signal to a lot of fedgov folks that it was time to lie low and store up grain for famine years. But like the grasshoppers most of them are, now they’re facing a missed paycheck tomorrow because Trump won’t back down on the Wall. I find it really hard to do anything but laugh about that. Fuck ’em. Embrace the suck of being a poor public servant rather than a rich public master.*
Their only saving grace may be that Pelosi and Schumer are now looking for a way out, because Trump is not backing down and it’s clear as day that Pelosi and Schumer and the Democrats are the ones blocking the way forward not only to working border control, but also to all those whigning fedgovers having a chance of getting paid for the next few weeks or months.
Let’s face it — when even uber-proggie Cher is telling Pelosi not to “die on this hill”, and “let [Trump] have his money”, maybe the crazy Left is finally beginning to understand that prolonging the shutdown over the Wall — the Wall being quite popular with a majority of Americans, the last time I looked at a poll — is not going to do the Democrats any favors in the run-up to 2020.
Come on, Chuck and Nancy — let’s protect our own citizens for once. Swallow hard, and give the President what he and most of the rest of the country want.
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* As Velociman once trenchantly put it, “No public servant should ever be able to threaten a citizen with anything other than a poor shoe shine.”