Letter to the editor: Hey Uncle Sam, offering buyouts will save money

After reading Mike Causey’s Aug. 17 article, Your retirement plan: 44 days and counting, I am left, as I have been for years, trying to understand why Congress cannot DO THE MATH. You have 77,000 federal workers ready to retire. They are waiting for the next buyout to be offered, whether it be $40,000 or $25,000!

If you offer this, you’d reduce your budget, even I know sometimes in life you have to bite the bullet and spend money to make money! Meaning you offer the buyout to the federal workers who are at the top of their salary scale, and the person you hire in their place you pay less money, thus saving money on each person that is replaced.

In other words, in layperson’s terms, you have less to shell out in the yearly budget. So say you offer someone making $58,000 the buyout of $40,000 and pay the new employee $38,000. With a paper figure of splitting the cost of the buyout over two years. By the third year, the budget is then reduced to saving $20,000 on that particular employee!

So times that by the number of employees that are at that figure and voilà, you have reduced the budget. Yes, I know they still have to have the money upfront to offer the buyouts, but in the long run, that’s a financial no-brainer to me! But hey, what do I know? I am only the wife of a federal government employee that manages the household budget and has numerous times “robbed Peter to pay Paul!”

Evelyn C. O’Hara-Stine is the wife of Dale Stine, Sr., an electronics mechanic at Tobyhanna Army Depot, Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania. Dale, as of December, will have worked for the Department of Defense at Tobyhanna for 34 years, plus four years as a member of the United States Air Force.

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