Furloughs

State workers are now being held to a 2 day a month work furlough. This is one of the state's answers to how to save money. Well, great, except for the poor workers. So the poor state workers trying to support their families and make it in an already tight economy are now expected to do so on a 9% pay cut. Assuming those state workers make 60,000 per year, that's a rough and conservative estimate...they are employed by the state after all...that equates to 450 dollars LESS per month. Maybe for some families who have two incomes that wouldn't be the death knell. However, I KNOW some of those state workers and know many of them are single parents and I KNOW this is a HUGE problem. For those of you who are sick of my single parent rants I would refer you back to the description of my blog and say skip this if you so choose.... What pisses me off is that not ONE of our lawmakers is being furloughed or being expected to accept a 9% paycut to their salaries. Arnold Schwarzenmuscles ran his platform on how Gray Davis was doing such a shitty job and how he was going to come in and government was going to be different and not prone to the bi-partisan squabbling it was suffering from. REALLLYYY?????? How's that working out for you now Arnie? Seriously...now it's worse. And the irony remains still that we had to PAY for a re-call election...that cost millions of dollars. The way I see it Arnold didn't deliver (I didn't want the recall and certainly didn't vote for him) so I think he should reimburse the state the cost of that election out of his own pocket. He has the money and it's time for him to feel the pinch like those poor state workers are.

Of course, this all freaks me out a little because of the fact that I'm a county worker and am really hoping that we don't end up in the same boat as the state.