Conversation With a Bureaucrat

I had opportunity to speak with a Federal Bureaucrat last week.  The conversation was ordinary, non-political small talk.  That was until he started complaining about how broke his employer is and how rough its making his life.

I tried, I really tried to keep my mouth shut.  I was at work, on my employers dime, and my employer does business with the government.  Do not upset the apple cart.  Do noootttt....

Him:  "You have no idea how hard it is to get by on a G-15's pay".

Me:  "That's like what, only six figures right?"

Apparently he missed the sarcasm in my voice.  Unbelievably he thought I was commiserating with him.

Him:  "It's a little better than that, but they cut my overtime and per diem waay baack".

Me:  "Maybe your boss should cut back on all his extra curricular activities."

The conversation morphed into a discussion on Obummers habits and the fact that according to the person I was speaking to it costs several million dollars for him to leave the White House to go anywhere.  Little excursions like playing golf can set the tax payer back $16 million an outing.  The president only does that between 2 and 3 times a week.

Not part of my conversation, but lets do some math.  Assuming 2 times a week and $4 million a pop (keeping this estimate at the low end) and only golfing 48 weeks a year, that works out to:

48*8years = 384 weeks * 2times a week = 768 golf outings * $4million per outing = $3,072,000,000 for golf.

Mark Knoller an "expert" on Obama's golfing pegs a much lower number of outings through this last August, 247 rounds.  Again that math looks like:

247 rounds * $4million per round = $988,000,000

Gee that's a lot better, not quite a billion bucks for O's golfing.

Take your pick, between roughly 1 and 3 billion dollars so Obummer could hit the links.  This isn't counting all the private vacation trips for his wife and girls or his normal vacations.

There are over 100,000,000 Americans out of work (labor participation rate).  There is another huge but unreported number is the underemployment rate which peaked this last year at 16.2%.   Out of the 218 million people working,  35,316,000 of them are working at jobs that the are overqualified for and probably underpaid.  I'm in that number.

For the record a GS-15 pay rate scale STARTS  at $101,630 and goes up to $132,122.  I didn't know that, I had to look it up.  This guy lives in West Virginia.  The average annual household income in that state is $40,034.  I can't imagine how he's managing to scrape by.

What does he do that he is so unfairly paid?  He is in Wyoming this month to draft provisions to decrease coal mining productivity and artificially increase compliance cost as a precursor to shutting down our domestic energy production.