Thursday, January 22, 2009
First day news: Barack Obama helps employers, bloggers, and the Chinese
Hey, he's off to a great start! On his first day on the job yesterday, Barack Obama helped two groups to which I belong, employers and bloggers, and only one group that I do not belong to: Chinese business.
Obama plowed the road for employers yesterday by announcing a freeze in pay for White House staff earning in excess of $100,000. Employers all over the country have done or are thinking about doing the same thing, more or less, and this gesture by an enormously popular new president will help employees understand the decision. Fortunately, because of rapidly falling prices for oil and other commodities, most people with jobs have more spending power today than they did a year ago.
President Obama should petition Congress to extend that freeze to the entire federal government, and he should require states that want federal bailout money to do the same thing. Congressional Republicans should nudge him along. Americans want to see government employees share at least some of the risk in the economy, especially since government at all levels played no small role in building up the huge amount of debt that now so presses down.
The new president also helped bloggers! One of his first-day orders directed federal agencies to develop plans to make much more previously confidential or secret information available to the public. With the reportorial resources of the mainstream media in full retreat, it will mostly be bloggers, free-lancers, and cranks who dig through the mass of new material and make it available to the public. Conservative bloggers in particular should welcome this change, since it will give them much grist for the mill.
Now for the Chinese: Unfortunately, the "open government" order will have adverse consequences for the relationship between business and federal regulators. Businesses know that when they surrender sensitive information to the government, competitors, including particularly Chinese and other foreign competitors, will be the first request it. In the hurly-burly of the legislative and regulatory processes, American business often lifts its objections to new governmental oversight if it gets adequate assurances that competitive intelligence will not be released under the Freedom of Information Act or other procedures. If President Obama's directive makes it more difficult for regulators to keep business information confidential you can be sure that corporate America will fight new regulation much more aggressively than it has in the recent past.
6 Comments:
By 
Georg Felis, at
Thu Jan 22, 11:14:00 AM:
I wonder how many positions this executive order covers? There are about nine thousand appointee positions that are listed in the Plum Book, many or most of them Senior Executive Service (ES) positions or General Services positions over GS14 that start at over 100k, the vast majority of which are not “White House Staff”. Even that designation is flexible, during the Clinton administration, a great number of White House staff positions were “cut” by simply being transferred to other agencies (while the employee remained at the same desk, doing the same job).
And as far as I can tell, this just means appointees will just not get that 2.9% COLA this year, with no assurances that they will not get “lump sum reimbursement” after a year or so after the memory fades.
By 
, at
Thu Jan 22, 11:46:00 AM:
Champagne bubbles aside, or at least the flighty first day actions equivalent that you've cited, his first day also included a first telephone call to a foreign leader. Now that's a big deal. Righty bloggers are claiming his first call was to Abu Abbas, or whatever the gangster running the west bank uses for a name. Could that possibly be true? Why?
By Viking Kaj, at
Thu Jan 22, 01:15:00 PM:
My pay has been kind of "frozen" since I got laid off last February.
You would think that it wouldn't be that hard for a JD/MBA patent attorney to find regular work. But NOOOO, I'm too qualified, they want somebody younger, I'd be bored with the position.
Maybe I should look into government service...
By , at
Thu Jan 22, 01:24:00 PM:
I understand that municipal workers in Monmouth County are upset that they've been given the choice of no COL increase or they can have their COL but risk layoffs. This shows how clueless government workerss are. My company had layoffs AND the rest of us ate salary cuts. No one asked for our input.
By Viking Kaj, at
Thu Jan 22, 02:05:00 PM:
What do you guys think about welfare? I'm thinking if you can't beat the Obama electorate maybe you should join them...
By Dawnfire82, at
Thu Jan 22, 04:33:00 PM:
Once socialism gets going, the only way to kill it is to suck it dry...
