Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/24/u-s-commerce-secretary-wilbur.html
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Christ, what an asshole.
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Is he offering to provide those loans himself? Interest free?
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If it were just him this would be easier to write off, but it is apparent from their behavior that even the people claiming to support the employees in our government have no real conception of the hardship this is causing. I guess that is a side effect of filling a government with millionaires funded by billionaires.
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Holy shit, what privileged ignorance these guys live in. I wonder why he didn’t mention “Just withdraw some money from your trust fund.”
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Not an American, so maybe I don’t understand: those federal workers not working will not receive backpay, correct? Only those forced to work without pay will be compensated later, right?
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Nonono. He’s got it all backwards. You see, it’s the federal government that is required to bail out the banks when they can’t get their shit together, not the other way around.
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I believe you mean “someone else’s trust fund”. He is a banker, after all
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Even worse he doesn’t see that federal workers are worth the bother.
“…even if the 800,000 workers never got paid, it would amount to less than one percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, he said.”
I can hear him telling his dumb-ass boss that “Fire them all, no harm to us.”
unFuck him.
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“Let them borrow cake.”
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They didn’t think the light switch was attached to anything when they turned it off.
Because they’ve happily convinced each other for their entire lives that the government doesn’t do anything, and that whatever the government attempts is riddled with incompetence.
This shows the dangers of getting high on your own supply.
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So, now the game plan should be… borrow as much money as you possibly can, and then default like a motherfucker.
ETA Seriously. I’m not kidding. The time may finally have come to ride this bomb down to the ground, waving your hat like Slim Pickens.
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I’m sure the payday loan industry and their paid representatives would love to bleed high interest from government employees and contractors and spin it into profits.
Also, how many people living paycheck to paycheck have the collateral for a conventional loan? Not everyone has a wizard with magic silver snake eggs to bail them out.
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If a law is passed that says they will. I think everyone expects this to be the case but it’s not automatically the case.
If it were generally the case that affected employees had savings and weren’t already in debt, then that would be a thing we could focus on, and Ross’ suggestion might work. Somehow, though, in America people with government jobs are to a large extent one paycheck away from catastrophe.
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Based on past practice, all furloughed workers have gotten full back pay for the time they were furloughed and not working. It does take a specific law to authorize it, though, it’s not automatic.
This time, the “Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019” became law on January 16th, and it provides back pay for all Federal Employees affected by a lapse of appropriations after December 22, 2018.
So he’s right, in that all the affected employees will (eventually) get paid. In theory, they could take that to the bank or credit union as he’s suggesting and ask for a loan.
But any such loan would be open-ended both in terms of amount and duration (if I’m getting the median Federal salary of about $76K, that works out to about $1000 take-home per week, with no end in sight). Not many banks would be willing to offer such a loan, even if it does seem like a no-brainer to do so.
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Normally, as most of us here do, I invoke the guillotine as an admonitory spectre rather than as a prescription.
For a corrupt scumbag like Ross, I’d make an exception to that rule.
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