WE THE PEOPLE PETITION: Sharing the Sequestration Pay Cuts w/Congress and the President 22FEB13

HERE is a great We The People petition calling for Pres Obama and ALL members of Congress to   share the burden of sequestration budget cuts. To be honest in order for the President and Congress to have their pay cut 20% that action would have to be passed as legislation to take effect as soon as it is signed by the President or added to any deal resulting in legislation to be passed by Congress and then signed by the President. Still, this is a perfect forum for letting Pres Obama and Congress know how we feel. Click the link to sign the petition and share with family, friends, coworkers, etc...

If federal employees are required to take furloughs and suffer 20% pay cuts, Congress (Senate and House) members and President Obama (the people who are responsible for the sequester and the resulting furloughing of federal employees) will "share the pain" by taking 20% pay cuts themselves.

Members of Congress and the President (due to their inaction) will take responsibility and in a show of solidarity and unity with the 800,000+ employees - who through no fault of their own will be forced to accept 20% pay reductions - will share equally in the pain and suffering that they themselves are responsible for.

http://wh.gov/vmcm

Created: Feb 22, 2013

Issues: Budget and Taxes, Defense, Family

Cantor calls for increasing federal employee retirement contributions 21FEB13

rep eric "kapo" cantor r VA continues the gop / tea-bagger assault on the federal workforce, an easy target in times of recession, tight budgets and sequestration. Those of us fortunate enough to have jobs are dealing with increased Social Security taxes as well as trying to find the money to save for retirement while still being able to survive on our stagnant incomes. Requiring federal workers to pay more for their retirement plans to make up for cuts of taxpayer subsidies to those plans is a reality most of us are facing. My employer doesn't offer any type of retirement plan, I have to contribute to my 401-K to have something to supplement my Social Security. Federal workers are employed by the taxpayers, and so are facing the same harsh economic realities from their employers the rest of us are facing. But at least the federal workforce works. They work a full work week, and we know, because the government hasn't come to a grinding halt, that the vast majority of them actually work. They deserve our respect, thanks and support. 
My question to "kapo" cantor is if his proposal also applies to members of congress? Senators and Representatives are also federal workers employed by the rest of us, and so should be subject to this proposal. For additional savings cantor should also propose elimination of the taxpayer subsidies of the health care plan for members of congress. He would also do well to institute a 5 day work week (for the House, where he can take that action) because while the gop / tea-baggers enjoy condemning the "lazy, over-payed, under-worked, bloated" federal workforce in their propaganda to the masses, the fact remains our country wouldn't be facing sequestration if congress actually worked.  

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) on Thursday repeated his call to replace sequestration with changes including revisions to the federal employee retirement program.

“Rather than take border patrol agents off the job, the President should instead choose to reform the federal employee retirement system so it matches what people get in the private sector,” Cantor said in a statement.

Cantor was referring to increasing the employee share toward their civil service annuity benefits, Rory Cooper, a spokesman for Cantor, said in an e-mail.

“Virtually no one has both a defined benefit and a defined contribution retirement system in the private sector,” Cooper said. “We wouldn’t eliminate it, but we would make the employer (taxpayer) subsidy less generous.”

Numerous proposals to increase employee contributions toward retirement — while lowering the government share by an equal amount — have circulated in recent years. President Obama recommended an increase 1.2 percentage points over three years in a fall 2011 proposal to the budgetary “supercommittee.” That special committee’s failure to reach an agreement left automatic budget cutting as the default way to achieve deficit reduction required by a law that raised the debt ceiling.

The White House included that recommendation in early 2012 in its fiscal 2013 budgetproposal. It estimated that the change would cost employees $21 billion over 10 years. Congress did not enact a 2013 budget. Instead, it generally extended spending at 2012 levels through a temporary measure set to expire next month, when a series of sharp automatic sharp cuts in spending on defense and other agencies and programs is set to go into effect.

The House last spring passed a bill designed to offset part of the sequester that included a 5 percentage point increase in employee contributions to be phased in over five years. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that increase – along with several more minor retirement-related provisions — as costing employees $79 billion over 10 years.

Cantor sponsored a sequester replacement bill that passed the House in December that included the same increase, among other provisions. The Senate did not take up either bill.

Said Cantor’s spokesman: “The President proposed reforming the federal pension system to the Joint Committee, it is in his budget and it was in our sequester replacement bill. Instead of raising taxes, this is the type of spending reform we should all be able to find agreement on, in order to avoid the negative effects of the sequester.”

Cantor’s statement also called for cutting waste and tightening government spending controls.

Many agencies, including Customs and Border Protection and the Pentagon, have said that if sequestration hits they would have to take numerous cost-saving steps, including putting employees on unpaid furloughs.

Nearly nine-tenths of federal employees are under the Federal Employees Retirement System, for which they pay the standard Social Security payroll tax of 6.2 percent of salary. Those first hired before this year pay an additional 0.8 percent of salary toward a civil service annuity; under a law enacted early in 2012, those first hired this year and after must pay an additional 2.3 percentage points.

Most other federal employees are under the Civil Service Retirement System, which requires a 7 percent of salary contribution for a civil service annuity that on average is worth nearly twice what a similarly situated FERS employee would receive. CSRS employees do not pay into Social Security, nor do they receive a benefit from that system for their federal employment years.

Federal employees are also eligible to save in the defined contribution Thrift Savings Plan, which operates much like a private-sector 401(k) program.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2013/02/21/cantor-calls-for-increasing-federal-employee-retirement-contributions/?wprss=rss_politics&wpisrc=nl_wonk

10 Things Conservatives Don’t Want You To Know About Ronald Reagan 5FEB11

MORE on the evil and hypocrisy of the reagan administration showing his presidency is nothing to celebrate but instead a reminder to thank God our Republic survived his administration....See my earlier post REAGAN'S LEGACY (AT 100) & REMEMBERING BENJAMIN LINDER 4FEB11.
Quote from "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance:

"When a legend becomes fact, print the legend."

Conservative belief:

"When a lie is better than the truth, print the lie."

Dogma for followers of the Reagan Religion. 

This from ThinkProgress and Salon.....



Tomorrow will mark the 100th anniversary of President Reagan’s birth, and all week, conservatives have been trying to outdo each others’ remembrances of the great conservative icon. Senate Republicans spent much of Thursday singing Reagan’s praise from the Senate floor, while conservative publications have been running non-stop commemorations. Meanwhile the Republican National Committee and former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich are hoping to make few bucks off the Gipper’s centennial.
But Reagan was not the man conservatives claim he was. This image of Reagan as a conservative superhero is myth, created to untie the various factions of the right behind a common leader. In reality, Reagan was no conservative ideologue or flawless commander-in-chief. Reagan regularly strayed from conservative dogma — he raised taxes eleven times as president while tripling the deficit — and he often ended up on the wrong side of history, like when he vetoed an Anti-Apartheid bill.
ThinkProgress has compiled a list of the top 10 things conservatives rarely mention when talking about President Reagan:

1. Reagan was a serial tax raiser. As governor of California, Reagan “signed into law the largest tax increase in the history of any state up till then.” Meanwhile, state spending nearly doubled. As president, Reagan “raised taxes in seven of his eight years in office,” including four times in just two years. As former GOP Senator Alan Simpson, who called Reagan “a dear friend,” told NPR, “Ronald Reagan raised taxes 11 times in his administration — I was there.” “Reagan was never afraid to raise taxes,” said historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited Reagan’s memoir. Reagan the anti-tax zealot is “false mythology,” Brinkley said.
2. Reagan nearly tripled the federal budget deficit. During the Reagan years, the debt increased to nearly $3 trillion, “roughly three times as much as the first 80 years of the century had done altogether.” Reagan enacted a major tax cut his first year in office and government revenue dropped off precipitously. Despite the conservative myth that tax cuts somehow increase revenue, the government went deeper into debt and Reagan had to raise taxes just a year after he enacted his tax cut. Despite ten more tax hikes on everything from gasoline to corporate income, Reagan was never able to get the deficit under control.
3. Unemployment soared after Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts. Unemployment jumped to 10.8 percent after Reagan enacted his much-touted tax cut, and it took years for the rate to get back down to its previous level. Meanwhile, income inequality exploded. Despite the myth that Reagan presided over an era of unmatched economic boom for all Americans, Reagan disproportionately taxed the poor and middle class, but the economic growth of the 1980′s did little help them. “Since 1980, median household income has risen only 30 percent, adjusted for inflation, while average incomes at the top have tripled or quadrupled,” the New York Times’ David Leonhardt noted.
4. Reagan grew the size of the federal government tremendously. Reagan promised “to move boldly, decisively, and quickly to control the runaway growth of federal spending,” but federal spending “ballooned” under Reagan. He bailed out Social Security in 1983 after attempting to privatize it, and set up a progressive taxation system to keep it funded into the future. He promised to cut government agencies like the Department of Energy and Education but ended up adding one of the largest — the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, which today has a budget of nearly $90 billion and close to 300,000 employees. He also hiked defense spending by over $100 billion a year to a level not seen since the height of the Vietnam war.
5. Reagan did little to fight a woman’s right to chose. As governor of California in 1967, Reagan signed a bill to liberalize the state’s abortion laws that “resulted in more than a million abortions.” When Reagan ran for president, he advocated a constitutional amendment that would have prohibited all abortions except when necessary to save the life of the mother, but once in office, he “never seriously pursued” curbing choice.
6. Reagan was a “bellicose peacenik.” He wrote in his memoirs that “[m]y dream…became a world free of nuclear weapons.” “This vision stemmed from the president’s belief that the biblical account of Armageddon prophesied nuclear war — and that apocalypse could be averted if everyone, especially the Soviets, eliminated nuclear weapons,” the Washington Monthly noted. And Reagan’s military buildup was meant to crush the Soviet Union, but “also to put the United States in a stronger position from which to establish effective arms control” for the the entire world — a vision acted out by Regean’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, when he became president.
7. Reagan gave amnesty to 3 million undocumented immigrants. Reagan signed into law a bill that made any immigrant who had entered the country before 1982 eligible for amnesty. The bill was sold as a crackdown, but its tough sanctions on employers who hired undocumented immigrants were removed before final passage. The bill helped 3 million people and millions more family members gain American residency. It has since become a source of major embarrassment for conservatives.
8. Reagan illegally funneled weapons to Iran. Reagan and other senior U.S. officials secretly sold arms to officials in Iran, which was subject to a an arms embargo at the time, in exchange for American hostages. Some funds from the illegal arms sales also went to fund anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua — something Congress had already prohibited the administration from doing. When the deals went public, the Iran-Contra Affair, as it came to be know, was an enormous political scandal that forced several senior administration officials to resign.
9. Reagan vetoed a comprehensive anti-Apartheid act. which placed sanctions on South Africa and cut off all American trade with the country. Reagan’s veto was overridden by the Republican-controlled Senate. Reagan responded by saying “I deeply regret that Congress has seen fit to override my veto,” saying that the law “will not solve the serious problems that plague that country.”
10. Reagan helped create the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. Reagan fought a proxy war with the Soviet Union by training, arming, equipping, and funding Islamist mujahidin fighters in Afghanistan. Reagan funneled billions of dollars, along with top-secret intelligence and sophisticated weaponry to these fighters through the Pakistani intelligence service. The Talbian and Osama Bin Laden — a prominent mujahidin commander — emerged from these mujahidin groups Reagan helped create, and U.S. policy towards Pakistan remains strained because of the intelligence services’ close relations to these fighters. In fact, Reagan’s decision to continue the proxy war after the Soviets were willing to retreat played a direct role in Bin Laden’s ascendency.

Conservatives seem to be in such denial about the less flattering aspects of Reagan; it sometimes appears as if they genuinely don’t know the truth of his legacy. Yesterday, when liberal activist Mike Stark challenged hate radio host Rush Limbaugh on why Reagan remains a conservative hero despite raising taxes so many times, Limbaugh flew into a tirade and demanded, “Where did you get this silly notion that Reagan raised taxes?“

Update Salon has more in their series "The Real Reagan," including how he cared more about UFOs than AIDS and how Regean destroyed respect for the social compact that rebuilt America after World War II.