United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon believes that there is a global environmental crisis that requires looting the Western economies to the tune of trillions of dollars in coming years. But such financial plundering apparently will not be standing in the way of a quite substantial pay increase for United Nations employees.
At a time when the West is reeling from a global recession, and individuals, corporations, and even profligate governments are realizing that a measure of financial reality is no longer optional, the recent UN diktat that $76 trillion would be needed over the next two generations to be redistributed as Third World environmental welfare sounded like a bad joke. Now, the decision to enact a significant pay raise for UN bureaucrats is further proof of Ban’s poor sense of comedic timing.
Only months ago, the secretary general was saying that the UN was facing an “emergency situation” and demanding budgetary cuts. Now, members of the UN staff in New York have received a 2.2 percent increase in their pay. As reported at FoxNews.com:
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Among other things, the new income hike means that the highest ranked officials at the U.N. headquarters — including members of the audience Ban harangued last March — will get a take-home, tax-free pay package of about $240,000.
The same officials last year would have earned about $235,240. That is about one-fifth higher than the gross pay of the highest level officials of the U.S. government, including federal Cabinet members, who earn a maximum of $199,700 — before deductions and taxes. But the U.S. officials still pay taxes, which reduces their pay, on federal taxes alone, by about another 21 percent.
The difference is even bigger for the next highest tier of U.N. officials, who take home about $220,000 a year, tax-free, after the new COLA hike, known in U.N.-speak as a “post adjustment.” That’s up from about $215,760 last year. Compared to the $179,700 earned by U.S. officials at the equivalent federal pay grade, the difference is about 22 percent — before the U.S. officials start paying taxes, which they must do, like all U.S. citizens.
In fact, the top brass of the U.S. government are likely to fall even further behind U.N. pay scales in the future.
The bloated, overpaid federal bureaucracy has finally found an institution that can rival and outstrip its incapacity for restraint. The tax exempt character of UN wages only makes the situation worse, of course, removing the luxurious salaries from the tax base of the nations of which such international bureaucrats are ostensibly citizens.
With an institutional history of failure to keep the peace, even as it pursues a series of agendas that are fundamentally in conflict with American national sovereignty and the rule of constitutional law, the notion that UN bureaucrats will grow even more wealthy off the funds extracted from the United States and other nations is obscene. As the Department of Labor reports that weekly claims for unemployment insurance have soared to 417,000 — the 20th week in a row when first-time claims have exceeded 400,000. As unemployment remains a crisis in the United States, and the federal and state governments watch their budgets teeter on the brink of collapse, and economic growth remains stagnant, at least the populace may rest easy knowing the denizens of the United Nations monolith have been surfeited at the taxpayers’ expense. And those same overpaid globalists will continue to dream of the ways in which they will better order the economies of the world by stripping what wealth remains within the West and scattering it over the rest of the globe.
