Defense Furlough Quick Math

I was reading this article at money.com about how the sequester is affecting civilian defense employees. Apparently 800,000 employees hours will be cut 20% over the next 5 months. The headline of course is 20% PAY CUT…which I suppose is technically true…but they do get an extra day off each week….so it’s not like they are doing the same amount of work for less pay(unless they already screw around 8 hours a week 🙂 ). I guess that’s a minor quibble if you have a $300 cell phone payment due next week. If my employer offered me a 32 hour work week…with benefits…I think I’d go for it, but that’s just me.

So, I busted out my calculator to get an idea what this does to the deficit math. I figure 800k employees, averaging $75k per year…so that’s $60B. *0.2/12….gets me to $1B per month savings….for the next 5 months. In a $300B+ monthly budget. Yawn… Isn’t math awesome?