Biden Raises Salaries For Richest Government Employees
Taxpayers Rejoice at Not Funding Toddlers, Antiracist Babies, and College Students
The top government employees just got the biggest pay raise ever. Courtesy of Joe Biden.
He announced that he would give an almost a 10 percent increase in military spending in next year’s budget. That means a $77 Billion dollar pay raise for the pentagon contractors. Lockheed Martin, that gets almost all its revenue from U.S. taxpayers, about 90 percent, will see a tremendous rise in CEO and executive pay.
These CEO and their “C-Suite” comrades are really government employees. During the forever war the prior Lockheed CEO took on $30.9 million for one year. That would mean a $2.7 million dollar pay raise since 90 percent of that yearly compensation package is all taxpayer dollar, or $27 million of the CEO’s pay was from U.S. taxpayer dollar directly. The $30.9 million of Lockheed CEO Hewson was up 43% from the previous year’s $21.5 million. A similar top military contractor, General Dynamics, saw its CEO, Novakovich, made $18.9 million. Again, 90 percent coming from US taxpayers. (The other ten percent from foreign military sales, as per below — so other countries’ taxpayers).
Talk about overpaid government employees!
Their towering near monopolies pulls in a monstrous amount, virtually unopposed by any one in Congress. All the Senators combined don’t make that much. Each U.S. Senator by comparison draws under $200,000 a year. At one hundred of them, that’s not even $20 million of US taxpayer dollars.
General Dynamics’ CEO got a pay raise last year, up to $19 million. That’s a 6% raise. This year’s haul should be an even bigger pull of taxpayer money. These are expensive government employees. Floating your stock on the stock market doesn’t make you a free-market capitalist company. It’s not free when you take in all your business from one customer, and that customer is the US taxpayer.
Let’s stop praising these “free market” companies when they are entirely dependent on Government contracts.
US and foreign taxpayers are their only clients. Additionally, other freebies include DARPA paying for some R&D you can use. Worse, the Foreign Military Sales agency of the Pentagon sells equipment overseas for these companies, raking in $50.8 billion of overseas sales in 2020. 2021 saw sales drop $34.8 billion, apparently because no war was happening. Putin’s Ukrainian invasion will change that. Hard for him to sell a Russian plane or tank now to foreign countries.
So, a pay raise was needed, Biden decided. When the US taxpayer is footing the bill and the government sales office is selling for you, it’s harder to make a case for this type of nonsensical “free market” economics. Really, you’re talking about full blown socialism. One main customer, the US government, and some minor ones overseas, foreign governments. Taxpayer nirvana.
Worse, their stock can be freely-owned by those same senators who know that to increase their retirement savings and wealth fund, they just have to raise the budget above 6% a year. The stock is in a black box, but typically all senators own military stocks, and all own Microsoft stocks, another contractor. So a raise, say to like 10 percent, or 9.8% exactly under Mr. Biden, helps their black box portfolio grow at better than 6% market projections. No wonder senators hate term limits.
Meanwhile, diplomatic efforts are failing in places like the Ukraine and Russia, just to name the current hotspot. But it’s no wonder when the diplomatic bill, that for the State Department, is half that of the military bill, which is now going to be $830 billion. War is just better business.
If you check out the revenue sheets of any private or public company, you won’t see a near automatic pay increase in revenue of 6–11 percent a year. They actually have to make their own sales, pay their own overhead instead of using pentagon offices, and not get government officials to sell overseas for them. And keep in mind the special appropriations for the last 20 year “forever war” is not included in those budgets. That was an additional $2.1 trillion, extra, just for Afghanistan. And the Afgan girls are being kicked out of school because they can’t find uniforms. That whole campaign gets an ‘F’, helped no failing US schools, though socialist military bonuses were triple A prime.
The biggest public non-military companies in the world do NOT even bring in half that budget, except for Walmart, which makes about $559 million in revenue, about three-quarters of the defense bill. But their profit is far less, margins are thin, and overhead and sales all from their own pocket.
Yet asking for $2–4 billion for pre-K funding for our children gets severely beaten back by Senators. Public Universities brought in $82.7 billion in the college year ending in 2019. That is, for the record, almost the entire raise in the budget Biden is proposing for these government contractors. In other words, forgoing one year of an increase in the military budget and giving that increase to all college students attending public universities, could pay for ALL revenue for those universities.
Maybe just all black children should get free private schooling from 6 months old to 25 years old. That could be a start for reparations and still cost less than half of Biden’s proposed increase. Imagine doing what is morally right and still raising CEO pentagon pay by $40 billion. HR 40, here we come.
Notice: I am not saying NOT to defund the military, or not to cancel the defense budget, or even lower it by one penny. The GOP especially will close rank around these pentagon socialist monopiles if the smell of no funding for “security” and “law and order.” Just keep it where it is now, freeze it for one year to pay for all universities. But would these highest paid government employees stand for it like the CEO of Lockheed or General Dynamics? They would have to forgo buying a new yacht and instead pick up a second-hand one, perhaps a seized Russian one from an Italian impound yard?
Tax the rich? It looks like Biden is trying to mint the rich.
