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Federal News Radio
The 12 Days of
Congress
By Mike Causey
Monday - 8/18/2014
As often happens in August, the good news and the bad news are the
same: Congress is out of town, and the many White House operations
decamped to Martha's Vineyard last week.
Congress, which has pushed the three-day workweek to new horizons in
2014, is long gone. And it won't be back until a week after Labor Day.
At that point, it will have a total of 12 working days before
departing, again, to campaign. Then it's back here (briefly) after the
November elections.
The bad news is that if Congress and the White House learned to
peacefully coexist, there are a number of items, hot spots and problems
they could fix either by legalizing them, making them illegal or
throwing money at or withholding funds from various projects, problems
and people.
The good news, same as the bad, is because our elected officials
can't/won't blame (insert name of your personal political devils here)
and the fact that they only have a short time to do anything, including
nothing, there isn't much harm they can do.
House Republicans have taken the lead in going after federal workers
and their benefits package. But both sides have joined in. It was the
White House that first proposed sequestration and a two-year pay
freeze, which Congress later extended to three years. Both the GOP-run
House and the White House endorsed plans to make federal workers
contribute more pay toward their pensions. And both have proposed
reducing future cost-of-living adjustments for federal-military and
Social Security retirees. It would be done by measuring inflation using
the so-called "chained CPI" (Consumer Price Index).
Backers say using the chained CPI system would more accurately reflect
inflation and the way people respond to it. If prices for one item go
up, people switch to lower priced goods. The example is
steak-to-hamburger-to-chicken. The counter argument is that dog food,
not chicken, is the last stop for hard-pressed retirees.
Jessica Klement, legislative director of the National Active and
Retired Federal Employees, estimates changing the way retiree COLAs are
calculated would reduce future increases for the average CSRS retiree
($32,000) by $50,000 over the next 25 years.
Read this and other articles at Federal News Radio
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