President Joe Biden has given federal workers their biggest pay raise in more than 40 years even as many Americans are finding their salaries worth increasingly less as wages fail to keep up with Bidenflation.
Biden declared this giant pay raise on his own hook for more than two million government workers by issuing his Dec. 21 “Executive order on the adjustments of certain rates of pay,” which affects the “the rates of basic pay or salaries of the statutory pay systems.”
As maintained in his fiscal 2024 budget proposal revealed last March, Biden has now implemented a 4.7 percent across-the-board hike in basic pay, according to the website Government Executive. He is also preparing to give the military a 5.2 percent pay raise.
Up to 33,300 federal employees will also see a larger pay raise than expected because the Biden administration revamped its locality pay area map to adjust for the same high rate of inflation that Biden caused. There are 53 locality pay areas across the country and each one is configured on the cost-of-living data specific to each zone, Government Executive added in a report in November.
The new locality pay numbers were created in 2022 by Biden’s pay agent board, a group made up of Office of Personnel Management Director Kiran Ahuja, Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young, and acting Labor Secretary Julie Su.
In other words, as the number of Americans living in poverty rose under Biden, the president’s failed economic policy caused the cost of living to soar, and now he is giving his government workers higher pay to compensate for the inflationary forces he caused. As the saying goes, it’s a nice job if you can get it.
The government worker pay raise goes into effect for the first full pay period of 2024, beginning on Jan. 14 for most government workers.
In the end, it will be the largest pay raise at one time for federal workers since the 1970s when President Jimmy Carter initiated a 9.1 percent average pay raise, according to Government Executive.
Even as many Americans are losing their jobs and falling into financial hardship and businesses are having problems facing Biden’s failing economy, the government workforce has continued to grow. In the federal government’s 2022-2023 fiscal year, which rans from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30, Just between December 2022 and August of 3 alone, an additional 81,000 new government jobs were created, according to USA Facts.
Indeed, at going on 3 million workers, the federal workforce is a larger population than that of 15 states, according to the website World Population Review: from New Mexico at 2.1 million, to Idaho (1.974 million), Nebraska (1.972 million), West Virginia (1.765 million), Hawaii (1.433 milllion), New Hampshire (1.403 million), Maine (1.4 million), Montana (1.14 million), Rhode Island (1.1 million), Delaware (1 million), South Dakota (923,484), North Dakota (780,588), Alaska (732,984), Vermont (647,156), and Wyoming, at 583,279.
No wonder federal employees overwhelmingly donate to Democrats. A review of donations in 2020, for instance, found that federal employees donated $27,141,594 to Democrats while only $9,026,820 went to Republicans. That means that in 2020, 72.63 percent of donations to political causes and candidates went to Democrats while only 21.15 percent went to Republicans, according to a report by the website FedSmith in 2021.
“Political donations that are made reflect a strong allegiance to a candidate. From federal employees, their donations reflect an overall political allegiance to Democrats. There is clearly a larger number who contribute to Democrats than Republicans,” the website noted.
Meanwhile, a majority of Americans now live paycheck to paycheck and have found a lack of job security.
A LendingClub survey released in Sept. found that 61 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. That includes 78 percent of consumers who earn under $50,000 a year and 65 percent of those who make between $50,000 and $100,000, according to CNBC.
It’s bad enough for those who are earning at least liveable paychecks and — as long as they keep their jobs — can still pay the bills. But then there are millions who fall under that bar. Thanks to the burden of Bidenomics, U.S. homelessness has hit a record high, and the biggest growth in homelessness is in families.
This news broke only weeks ago in a report by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development which found that homelessness grew by a whopping 12 percent last year — the biggest increase since the numbers began being compiled in 2007.
“The sharpest rise in homelessness was among people in families with children — this measure rose by 15.5 percent,” The Epoch Times noted on Dec. 15. “Next was homelessness among unaccompanied youths, which increased by 15.3 percent.”
This growing insecurity and widening pay gap also forced millions of Americans who thought they had enough to retire to go back into the workforce as their savings were put in danger thanks to rising costs. According to the website ResumeBuilder, 1 in 8 seniors were forced to head back to work.
The “pandemic” also put a serious hurt on most Americans. A study from November revealed that the bottom 80 percent of Americans got significantly poorer starting in 2020 when Democrats all across the country began locking down their states and cities and destroying millions of jobs and small businesses, according to Activist Post, a website with a populist bent.
With all the pressures Americans are facing as Joe Biden’s “Bidenomics” continue to oppress them from coast to coast, it is highly doubtful that the average American would think federal workers deserve this giant pay increase, while the rest of us suffer pay decreases.
So, the optics of this pay raise for government workers is at the very least politically tone deaf. But I am sure Biden expects voters to have forgotten all about this by November.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
