Hoarding Groceries Survival Strategy for Furloughed Workers
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-21/hoarding-groceries-survival-strategy-for-furloughed-workers-1-.htmlDan Cepeda/Star-Tribune/AP Photo
Civilian employees of contractor Magic City Enterprises stock the commissary shelves after hours on Oct. 24, 2012 at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyo. A base spokesperson said each of the 1,100 civilians employed on the base could face forced furlough days amounting to about $8,000 in lost annual income if federal sequestration measures are enacted.
Pete Randazzo already has dipped into his savings to pay his daughters medical bills. Now another setback looms: a 20 percent reduction in pay for his job at a Navy school under federal budget cuts.
Randazzo, 51, an information technology specialist at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, is bracing for furlough days that now may begin in May.
The Defense Department (USBODEFN), which pays Randazzos salary, will be among the hardest hit. As many as 750,000 of its civilian employees may be required to take off at least one day a week. The Pentagon said today it would delay furlough notices until at least April 5, citing additional funding from Congress in a stopgap spending measure passed today.
As it gets closer, the anxiety is really rising, professionally and personally, said Randazzo, whose insurance company declined to cover his daughters condition. What happens when somebody has to deal with a crisis? The next person who runs into this is going to have some pretty hard decisions to make.
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(12,712 posts)result impact those who are taking the cut, it becomes yet another step towards crashing our economy.
Productivity goes up, wages stay relatively flat. Now, our clandestine austerity via that magic new word, "sequester" gives more people less buying power. That means even less money going into the economy. The result will be less jobs, lower pay, etc. Rinse and repeat.
If they want to take the government spending out of the equation by reducing the deficit, just what kind of magic will keep the consumer/goods cycle going? It is just common sense as much as it is economic theory.
Even if the government manages to keep things afloat, the jobs created in the private sector continue to assure that more money goes into the hands of the elite and investor class. That spells bust in the near future.
So, we are left with the question about the motivation behind obscuration and obstruction. This situation does not seem to be just about government spending since the private sector gets its consistent and continuing increase in productivity. The current minimum wage reveals a lot about the circumstances being created.
Who is it that wants to crash the economy and why? We are losing our semblance of political democracy and that is evident by the disconnect between majority views and the more obvious lack of representation of them.
As far as economic democracy goes, there actually is little to none to be found, especially with the hierarchical corporate tyranny model as the dominant model and method. Basically, any notion of "freedom' is dispelled when we can observe both our political and economic factors being radically and rapidly transformed into what appears to be a devastating, end game scenario that will hit most of us very hard and in the most tender of places.
The situation is very dire and maybe it has to culminate in collapse to end the current momentum. That's not going to be very comfortable and the massive suffering and hardship is what we would all want to prevent if we had the choice and power.