Thursday, April 07, 2005
Grover Norquist, Eat Your Heart Out
One of my friends works for the Social Security Administration. Now, SSA is not popular among the Republican Congresscritters on Capitol Hill. In fact, as has been amply demonstrated, the entire concept of Social Security is not and has never been popular with the Republican Party. So, in their political ascendancy, they have gone out of their way to attack the administrative budget of the program, which according to my friend has led to long-term hiring freezes so severe and a staff so overburdened that some supervisors are begrudging the recently widowed the time they took off work to go to their spouses' funerals. The employees are being stretched beyond the breaking point, and many of them are starting to fray around the edges. This came to a head recently, when according to my friend, a particularly offensive supervisor called a meeting to try and drop a load of "you haven't worked hard enough" guilt on the assembled staff. Apparently, the supervisor tried to blame the alleged suicide of a person seeking disability benefits on the staff's alleged laziness -- and not, instead, on overworked people staggering under a workload that starve-the-beast Republicans like Grover Norquist crafted especially to torture them.
More blogs about politics.
