Veteran senators Joe Lie-berman, an independent of Connecticut, and Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, have suggested a third year of pay freezes for federal employees.
Sens. Collins and Lieberman are both moderates, an endangered Washington species. Their middle-of-the-road politics makes it possible that their tough-minded proposal will win support from both sides of the aisle. Republicans will agree to cut spending; Democrats will remember that both Collins and Lieberman have sometimes helped them get touchy legislation passed.
Federal pay doesn’t represent a large part of the budget or the deficit, still, extending the pay freeze another year would save an estimated $32 billion, which is not to be sneezed at.
Furthermore, Collins and Lieberman propose that their package of wage freezes and pension reforms should apply to Congress and the congressional staff as well as to the rest of the government cadre. Congress should bend over backwards to see that any benefit cuts for any government workers are at least matched by cuts on their own pay package.
The pension reforms the two propose include basing retirement pay on earnings for the past five years rather than the last three years, as is currently the case. Because federal pay scales have been routinely increased every year until the current recession, this change will also save billions over time.
IT IS GENERALLY agreed that freezing federal wages can be done without any adverse effects on the function of government. The same observation can be made about most levels of government expenditures.
But there are important exceptions that must be kept in mind. At every level, local, state and federal, government spending will increase as population increases. It is reasonable to expect spending on education to rise with the numbers of students enrolled. Medicare costs not only rise with the unit cost of health care but, obviously, with the number of eligible beneficiaries.
Similar cost increases can be expected in every government function in which demands for the service performed rises year by year. It is reasonable to ask that government control unit costs; it is unreasonable to expect government to do more without spending more.
The cost of government also rises when the citizens governed demand additional services. To pick one current example: The American people have demanded that the federal government and some state governments crack down on illegal immigration. As a consequence billions more taxpayer dollars are being spent every year building fences, hiring border patrol agents, sending National Guard units to the border, prosecuting illegal immigrants and those who hire them and on the rest of the greatly stepped up immigration control effort that these public demands have required.
The attack on the United States by terrorists in 2001 resulted in the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. The current DHS budget is a little more than $32 billion.
Those are just two of the additional demands on taxpayers that government has made in the last 10 years — or, to say it as it is, the additional demands that the taxpayers have placed on their government.
We asked for it; we should be willing to pay for it.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
