Kierstin Aanenson is a nurse at the VA in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, making about $37,000 a year.
Chan Aaron is a soil conservation technician in Ashland, Oregon, making around $33,000.
Latisha Aaron is a pharmacist at the VA in Chicago, making a bit over $36,000.
Marcus Aaron is a pharmacist at the VA in Shreveport, Louisiana, also making around $33,000.
Fidarie Abasovski makes $31,000 as a food service worker at the VA in Milwaukee.
Keith Abara makes $30,000 as a forestry technician in California.
Those are workers in the federal government, the ones whose salaries are funded by the taxpayers, and I didn't even make it past the beginning of the A's when it came to looking up those salaries.
Now, just in time for Labor Day, President Donald Trump, a man who is the most miserable allegedly rich person in history, wants to deny workers who are not making even close to the median income of their states, let alone the country, a simple 2.1 percent raise. He also wants to shitcan locality adjustments to their pay so that someone living in, say, Chicago can afford to live instead of being on the same pay as someone in South Dakota.
Nope. Fuck those hundreds of thousands of Veterans Affairs employees and national park employees and more. Fuck the 2 million federal workers, a good percentage of whom work for all of us for pretty damn low pay.
Why? Because Donnie Bumblefuck wants to save the country money. He wrote (and, no, of course, he didn't write this), "We must maintain efforts to put our Nation on a fiscally sustainable course, and Federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases." Trump says the raises would cost $25 billion, and, yeah, you're right: the motherfuckin' tax cut is gonna cost a trillion over ten years, but that's rich people money and don't fuckin' dare touch that. (And it also is as much as he wanted for his worthless wall, so maybe that's in the calculation. Who the fuck knows with this heaping pile of rotting orange rinds we have for a president.)
Even the Wall Street Journal has a "What the fucking fuck?" moment in reporting on this bullshit. "The U.S. economy grew in the second quarter at the strongest pace in nearly four years," it said, adding, "Mr. Trump touted the data on Twitter Wednesday, saying, 'Our country is doing great!'" Again, for the wealthy. During the early part of the economic recovery, President Obama froze salaries in 2011 (under pressure from the Republican Congress, he froze them for longer than he wanted), but when the economy started expanding, he put the raises back into gear.
So the only reason to do this is because Trump is being an asshole for the sake of being an asshole, and he knows he's blown a hole in the budget with the tax cut. Fuck you, people taking care of veterans and all the veterans in the federal workforce, which is over a half-million. Don't worry, though. Trump says he loves you.
By the way, the only way this freeze on salaries won't go into effect is if Congress passes a raise and Trump signs off on it. So, yeah, it's gonna happen because if the GOP can dick over federal workers, they will do it in a heartbeat.
