Where’s shared sacrifice?

Those of us who shop at the Fairchild Air Force Base commissary have noticed that in order to comply with the “sequestration,” the commissary is now closed on Tuesdays, in addition to the usual Monday closures.

As a customer, this is a relatively minor inconvenience. The aisles are more crowded, checkout lines are longer and we have one day less to plan our commissary shopping trips. But for the employees of the commissary, Tuesday closures equals loss of a day’s wages per week, which is a 20 percent pay cut. This must be devastating for the commissary workers and the hundreds of other civilian employees at Fairchild who are being punished under the banner of sequestration. These are the people, just like most of us, who can ill afford a 20 percent pay cut.

So, where is the shared sacrifice? How about the members of our dysfunctional Congress who brought about the sequestration by being unwilling to do their jobs? Where’s their 20 percent pay cut? No doubt they could afford the cut more easily than the civilian employees at Fairchild. Surely, working one less day per week wouldn’t make Congress even less effective than it is now.

Paul Luppert

Spokane