Everyone now understands that on August 2 or shortly thereafter, the Treasury is going to have to prioritize which bills it pays and play triage with other obligations. Here’s my own list of the bills that should be the first that don’t get paid:
1, The salaries of every member of Congress, the President, and all their respective staffers. Before hundreds of thousands of honorable, hard-working federal employees feel the pain, the bunglers who bright about the pain should take the hit.
2. Next should be cuts of medical benefits for members of congress, the president, and their respective staffers. These cuts should certainly precede those for older and disabled Medicare recipients, and impoverished Medicaiders.
3. Special perks congress has finagled for itself over the years are an obvious first round spending cuts choice. These include the fancy gym and the subsidized cafeteria. If the latter lose causes difficulty meeting the basic nutritional needs of lawmakers, they might apply for food stamps like the 15 percent of other Americans who must subsist on them — if this benefit, too, hasn’t gone away. The congressional subway should also be axed as part of a post-debt ceiling fiasco. Walking between buildings might improve the congressional thinking process.
4. The president’s perks, too, are on my list for immediate cutting. Say bye-bye, Mr. Obama, to your ritzy private resort, Camp David. When you travel, go commercial air and endure the shoes-off and groping dance like the formerly middle class, currently peon class now endures. As for that private White House kitchen — it’s closed for the duration. Michele can pack you a bologna sandwich in the morning when she sends you off to pretend you’re really the leader of the Free World.
5. Presidential motorcades are definitely not affordable in this crisis. The president need not travel around in fancy cars using pricey gas at public expense while using contrived public functions as a beard for raising money for his next campaign.
6. Air conditioning in all buildings used by congress or the president is definitely not a priority. And if these worthies don’t decide on a budget and debt ceiling by November, heating bills in the building they work don’t get paid either.
7. Franked mail that allows congress to send letters to constituents for free is no priority worth preserving in this crisis. What do these people ever tell us anyway that we really want to hear? They want to spew self-serving nonsense via the post, let ’em pay for the stamps.
8. Salaries and benefit cuts for all federal judges, including those in the Supreme Court, actually go to the very top of my list of no-pays if we don’t get a debt ceiling deal. If these cuts don’t raise a constitutional issue (a la the 14th Amendment) in the mind of some federal judge, casing an immediate resumption of borrowing by the Treasury, I’ll eat my copy of the Constitution on a frank roll.
That’s it for now. Oh, in passing, if you happen to see a guy with a gold earring, befriend him. He may be wearing this country’s future currency.
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