Billy Long! He’s a bit mad.
First we have to *build *the wall.
No, that’s the hill they’re happy for poor people to die on.
A Republican Lawmaker Just Proposed Ending Compulsory Schooling
Paul Mosley of Arizona. I’d of guessed Florida, Alabama or Mississippi, but he’s a legislator in Arizona.
He’s gonna get the 2nd grade vote, for sure.
I’m sure congressional pensions are next on the list. They don’t need them if they make money doing something else, right?
And if he decides not to take speaking fees: “Lazy Obama decides to let Taxpayers fund his retirement!” “Why can’t he earn millions, like all the other Ex-Presidents?!?”
To be fair, congressional pensions are not nearly as generous as the presidential pension.
Not saying that makes it right, just saying that it is less of a threat to them.
It’s obviously targeted at Obama, but let’s be reasonable - is there any reason why the law isn’t a good idea in a vacuum?
I was going to make exactly the same point as Really Not All That Bright. If this measure weren’t such a blatant “fuck you” to Obama, i could actually get on board with the general sentiment.
On the one hand, the country should have a mechanism for recognizing the service of its leader, and providing him or her with a generous retirement is a fair and proper way to do that. But if the income that an outgoing president can get runs quickly into the seven or eight figures annually from speeches or book deals or whatever, then i think we can safely say that serving as the country’s leader has already taken care of that person’s financial security.
Well, yeah - because it is a pension, which is generally considered payment for work done previously. I’ve never heard of any other pension that gets reduced because someone has an alternative source of income, aside from Social Security (which isn’t exactly a pension, although of course is considered one and generally treated as one (except it has an inflation escalator, which AFAIK most pensions don’t)).
ETA - now, if you want to argue that the President doesn’t need a pension, I’m cool with that.
Firstly, your definition of a pension is not one that’s universally applied. For many people, a pension might be partly a reward for service, but it’s also a mechanism for ensuring that people can continue to survive financially once they’re no longer working. It might not be the case in the United States, but in plenty of countries with better government assistance programs, it’s actually a fairly well-established practice to reduce pensions when other income reaches a certain threshold.
My mother is on an old aged pension in Australia. She’s not poor, and she owns her own house, but she’s not rich either, and her pension helps supplement her savings. She can earn some money without it affecting her pension, but once she reaches a certain (relatively low) threshold, her pension is reduced by 50 cents for every outside dollar she earns in income. At a certain level of income, the pension goes away altogether.
This income test applies to a whole variety of pensions in Australia, and there are a number of other nations with similar systems.
To be honest, rather than aiming it straight at the President, i would support expanding this practice to a whole range of areas, including my own. As a public employee of the state of California, i am enrolled in a state retirement scheme. The aim of such schemes is, generally, to provide for people once they stop working. The schemes were never conceived as a way for people to leave one job and continue to earn a full pension while also drawing a full income at another job.
There was some public talk in the US about eliminating this pension “double dipping” during the financial crisis of 2009. People got angry seeing public servants retire from their jobs, grab six-figure pension deals, and then move straight to a new six-figure job in the private sector or, in some cases, even come back to their old public sector employers while collecting their public sector pensions. This story from 2009 mentions a Utah police chief who retired to activate his pension, and then came straight back to his old job. So he had his full salary, PLUS his $4000-a-month pension.
I’m a public employee, and i support treating public employees fairly on the job and in retirement. But a retirement package should be for exactly that: retirement. I wouldn’t get too draconian about this, and i would institute a sliding scale that would allow a reasonable amount of outside income before the pension was affected, but i don’t think the general principle of reducing pensions in response to large outside incomes is a bad one.
If they wanted it to be reasonable, they would have it affect only future ex-presidents.
Trump could do the right thing, and have it apply to him, but I would get behind a bill that essentially says it would start at #46, as anything else is a bit too much ex-post facto.
Or more likely, he doesn’t expect to ever be an ex-President. He expects to be more like his heroes Vlad and Kim Jong Un.
Or Louis XVI.
I would be in favor of this. But would it be ethical to make it retroactive? I mean, it would have to apply only to people who took jobs or were elected (because this should include all federal employees and congresscritters) after the law was enacted?
Somehow it seems more likely that he’d meet Mussolini’s end, as opposed to having a date with the guillotine. But likeliest of all is that he’ll retire to the island of Cyprus (to be near his ill-gotten billions).
Perhaps if Vlad and KJU have fallen from favor, too, they could share a nice gold-plated compound. (Now there’s a reality show for you…)
Shit, take his money, be much worse than killing him.
Yeah, I say hang him. When his lard ass falls through the trap, the weight will neatly sever his head where the noose meets the neck. We’lol have the satisfaction of the guillotine and the gallows in one.
And give him a job.
Or Nicolae Ceausescu