>USFS firefighter pay is dictated by the federal pay scale, where most start at the GS-3 level and where pay tops out at around $31,000 annually for full-time employees. By comparison, a first-year firefighter with Cal Fire makes nearly double that amount.
The beast just did the CARES act, essentially the largest upward transfer of wealth like that in human history. The beast is sending so much money and material to Ukraine that it accidently sent billions of dollars extra. The beast isn't starving it just doesn't give a shit about you.
No it didn’t. It technically sent $billions less to Ukraine due to the incorrect valuation being used for the mostly obsolete military equipment we’re lend leasing Ukraine.[1] It just means there’s $6.2B more worth of obsolete equipment that can be sent under existing authorization. Technically we’re ridding ourselves of the massive cost of decommissioning the equipment, getting valuable real-world intel on system performance and enemy capabilities, while knee capping one of our major geopolitical adversaries and our only significant marginal cost is shipping! This is the financial deal of the century!
> We have 6.2 billion worth of extra war crime equipment available
We don't have $6.2B worth as it's military accounting value, not actual value. There are no buyers for this obsolete equipment apart from Ukraine, and no longer any use for the US military. The money put into the equipment is a sunken cost and the US Gov has to incur the ongoing cost of storage or decommissioning. This entire controversy is based on a seemingly willful misunderstanding of why the military gives obsolete equipment a monetary label and then an equivocation of that monetary value label with actual money.
Eh, Ukraine is defending it's land from invaders that are actively genociding their population and aiming to exterminate their culture. I'm sorry but we must have war crimes confused.
Well pick whatever social program you want to implement and imagine it as cluster munitions leaving unexploded ordnance all over the place to kill and mutilate civilians, remaining dangerous long after the conflict is over, because that's what you picked instead.
> Well pick whatever social program you want to implement and imagine it as cluster munitions
All the numbers thrown around about the lend lease program are military accounting and do not impose almost any actual costs to the US tax payer, basically just the cost of shipping which is minuscule compared to the Military budget let alone Entitlements. Therefore, the comparison of essentially military funny-money and actual Entitlement increases is just hyper-partisan nonsense.
I forgot the sarcasm tag. Politicans who quack about stuff like this are generally full of shit.
Pretending to care about “the beast” means you make sure firefighters make less than McDonald’s managers, while “supporting the troops” by making sure your local defense contractors continue to get paid for making overpriced bolts or whatever.
No, it is not. The governments in all western countries throw almost unlimited money out of the window for the dumbest stuff imaginable.
Paying the guys keeping the burning parts of your country in check enough, so that they keep doing it seems like it would be up there with "maintaining roads".
The US federal budget deficit for the month of June was $228 billion. Money is being spent and the money printer is running no problem. The administration clearly does not view this as an important issue.
It's tempting to consider "the administration" or "the government" as a single entity that you can reason about like it was an individual.
More likely, there is a bit of focused lobbying being done to suborn the few decisionmakers involved with this, so that a company that contracts firefighting services to the government can grow their contract.
I don't know exactly how it works in California. I know there is a "California Conservation Camp" program that pays inmates $2.90 to $5.12 per day while in the camps, and $1.4 per hour fighting fires, but I don't know if they work with only state prisons or if private prisons get in on that too.
Maybe the cost savings there are enough to drive this dynamic.
People just want simple answers to complex problems, or in this case, purposely obtuse government workings. Not saying we don't have members in congress with good intentions, but they aren't in the positions of weighted power, often times they find themselves snuffed out or forced to fall in line.
The recent railroad strike fiasco was a perfect example of how things are really ran.
it would help if we would reallocate funds from the "kill the middle east brown people" fund to the "pay needed services" fund, like firefighting, replacement of water supply lines to homes, etc.
Every one of those top 100 is a medical officer and most I'd guess are doctors, they could all work in private sector healthcare and make a lot more money. I notice that not a SINGLE CTO or technology lead in government made the top 100 list.
The choice of the number 100 is arbitrary. I'm sure we can find some CTO or whatever you want at spot number 587 that makes 387k a year or whatever. Yes, the top 100 are medical officers, but the government has 17,000 employees that made more than 200k last year. They can't all be medical officers...
Because as you've described it, that wage won't scale with inflation. It sounds irresponsibly high now, but wait around and $100 in the future will sound like the $2.13/h + $30+/wk we have today.
