Negotiating your pay like the Pentagon budget

At my next annual review with my boss I’m going to use the Pentagon’s budget tactics. While my co-workers are taking pay cuts or getting pink slips I’ll make outrageous demands for 5% increases every year for the next decade then I’ll back down to a 1% cut this year while retaining my inflation adjusted salary from that point on.

That’s what the reported $500 billion budget cut Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is crowing about really is. He’s not talking about significant cuts to current spending he’s simply saying that we won’t increase spending as much as previously planned.

The real question is; if we’ve just ended the occupation of Iraq and we’ll be out of Afghanistan by 2014 why would we need to maintain high levels of defense spending let alone continue to increase it? We already spend more on defense than the next 13 nations combined. Why aren’t we returning to pre-war spending levels?

President Eisenhower, no military slouch once said “Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”