The WTP files: WH staff just like us… NOT!

posted at 9:58 am on July 3, 2011 by Kevin McCullough
[ Cronyism ]   

I’ve wanted to do a feature called the “We The People” for the longest time. During the writing of my new best-selling book (No He Can’t) I invoked the idea repeatedly, and people reviewing the text say it’s one of the best reminders they take away from the reading. SO… here we go:

CNNMoney is reporting that one out of every three White House staffers makes in excess of $100,000 dollars. And perhaps that wouldn’t be terrible if there were only 3, 9, 12, even 90 employees total. But there are 454.

And as the CNNMoney story points out, the list leans to the bigger payday. Only 3 WH staffers are volunteering their time – receiving no pay for the work they perform. (No doubt outside revenue allows them to donate their time to the nation’s cause.) But 21 staffers are raking in $172,000. Including newcomers Jay Carney and Bill Daley.

Supporters of the White House may say that as a contemporary CEO, the President’s salary of $400,000 and his executive team should receive competitive pay.

Yet one of the problems there is that in the world of real business, if anyone had produced the backwards “progress” that his team has, they would be getting pink slips, and taking hair cuts on options until they got the issues “turned around.”

There won’t be a huge outcry from the left on this, which is sad given that they like to play the class warfare game so often. But when you look at the average salary in the White House against the media salary for the American worker–you uncover one more “we’re better than you” scenario. And this where the aura of “us all being in this thing together” is growing thin and shrill for the one in ten workers looking for work who can’t find it, and the one in five American families who are working as hard as they can, but can not cover their most basic living expenses.

Parting question: The fact that CNNMoney is the one reporting on this disparity means “what” in terms of the middle left base that tends to put their trust in the Turner News property that supported Obama blindly through 2008?

I’m Kevin McCullough and that’s how I “Binge Think.”
And sometimes I write things to make you think too…

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