I'm going to rant about my pay raise (or lack thereof) and how President Bush is an idiot now (though, since he's my boss, I have to still respsect the office, etc. etc.).

Feel free to tune me out if you're one of those "President seems like a good guy to have a brewsky with, so it makes him a great president"-folks, or if you're one of those "Its a national crisis, so President Bush is allowed to become a supreme dictator"-folks.

Apparently they have to take away from my meager salary, in a time of recession when the goal is to ENCOURAGE spending, in order to "fight" the "war" on terrorism (I hope you can read in between the lines to how I'm dripping with sarcasm).

Today on Washington Post, I read:

In a letter addressed to congressional leaders, Bush said "full statutory civilian pay increases in 2003 would interfere with our nation's ability to pursue the war on terrorism." The letter was released last night.

So, prior to this announcement, I was supposed to get a 4.77% raise starting the first pay period in January. 3.1% was the "base" increase, and the rest of the difference was a "locality" increase to make my salary competitive with other engineering jobs in the Houston area. Now ALL salary increases, no matter where you live, will be limited to 3.1%.

The locality increases are extremely important, because they are there to close a current 20% gap in pay between the private and public sectors (before they started doing locality increases, the gap was 30%).

I know my complaining about the raise thing sounds rather selfish (even though I add it to the reasons why I think Bush is a really bad president, who had enough dumb-luck to be president during a period of time when large events occured). But this has much larger implications than you think. There are a lot of government agencies that are already having an enormous personnel crisis (and the military too, but they're not effected, because we need them to hunt down males between the ages of 18-35 with dark skin who wear turbins and ride on camels, so they get their full raise -- I don't mean to be sarcastic here because they have to do what they are told and probably don't enjoy that particular task anymore than it sounds like you would, and the military is so underpaid for their jobs its embarrassing).

Take NASA, over 60% of its employees are scheduled to retire in the next ten years. When highly trained, exceptional people see they can make 20% more in the private sector, the government loses its ability to recruit the "best and the brightest". And at a time when the government NEEDS good people (remember, "national crisis" and all). Some people will still take government jobs, like I did, because of decidedly more idealistic reasons, but you can't count on that to keep things running. And, as I've said before, government "benefits" are very much a myth, and large corporations seem to offer fairly comparable benefits, plus other tangibles, like bonuses and perks, that government employees don't get.

Luckily, I think Congress is going to fight this, in one's words:

Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.) said last night that he would continue the effort to obtain the 4.1 percent increase. "The budget numbers we had been following are all based on 4.1 [percent], so there would be no reason not to have the 4.1 percent," Wolf said. He also said civilian employees should get the same increase as the military, noting the participation of civilian employees in the war against terrorism.

In his 8 years in office (I'm really not doubting that Bush won't get a second term, most unfortunately, especially since he seems intent to make our "national crisis" last indefinitely), I get the feeling he is going to run us into the ground.

(If you're interested in this topic, don't even bother to read the article about it on CNN, it completely misrepresents the amount of the pay raises).

As a final note, all this saves the government an estimated $1 billion next year. That's it. Practically nothing to the government, but a huge step backwards for keeping quality people working for the government. Bush's much-cheered tax cuts are supposed to keep hundreds of billions of dollars in the hands of spenders. Couldn't he just take a hundredth of a percentage point off the tax cut and use it as pay for civil servants? That money would still end up out there in the market place ("improving" the economy) either way.