On Thursday, President Trump sent a letter to Congress making clear he wants to freeze federal employees’ pay for 2019. Here’s what his letter said:
Under current law, locality pay increases averaging 25.70 percent, costing $25 billion, would go into effect in January 2019, in addition to a 2.1 percent across-the-board increase for the base General Schedule. We must maintain efforts to put our Nation on a fiscally sustainable course, and Federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases.
How prudent that our president wants to maintain a fiscally sustainable course. Imagine, a budget increase costing $25 billion! Of course, that pales somewhat when compared with the $1.8 trillion tax cut Trump and the Republicans enacted late last year, but then that was largely directed to the wealthiest Americans, many of whom are now recycling those funds productively by donating a share of them to Republicans' election campaigns, and since Republicans are fiscally prudent, the tax cut, though at first glance blowing a hole in the budget 72 times larger than the amount of the raise to federal employees that Trump cites in his letter, was actually an exercise in fiscal prudence.
No?
