Personally I think today, Presidents Day, is one useless holiday. I have to ask is it really worth shutting down the Post Office, the banks, Court Houses and any other businesses that want to use this as an excuse to take the day off???

I guess what it is, I've experienced too many times, needing to take care of some business only to find, the other party took a holiday.

So how do you feel??? Is President's Day a useless holiday??? What other holidays do you find to be of little purpose???

For reference: List of Federal Holidays for 2006

Of these, my company doesn't take off for the Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., Washington's Birthday (President's Day), Columbus Day, or Veterans Day. Thus I find these an inconvenience when I need service from someone who takes the holiday.

I meant to provide the List of Federal Holidays for 2007.

Does anyone have information on the cost of a federal holiday?

Considering that we only have ten Federal holidays a year, I don't mind having a holiday to honor the leaders of our Country.

(Warning: The folowing post may be a sign of the Apocalypse.)

I agree with Scotty. There are 260 work days a year based on a 5 day, M-F work week. Taking 4% of those days as a holiday doesn't seem to be too much. While I don't consider Columbus Day to be a proper holiday, I do see the other days as either honoring important people or celebrating important events (except, of course, New Year's Day, which is generally a day of recovery)
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(I think I should lie down for a bit. My inner harmony has been disrupted; I need to center.)

Budget of the United States Government: Federal Employment and Compensation

If you download table 24-4, you will discover that civilian compensation for 2007 is expected to be around $ 244 billion. If there are 260 days of normal employment, are we then looking at just under a billion dollars of paid leave for federal employees for each holiday? What happens when you add state workers on top of that?

I have not counted military employment. To be fair, I suppose that many Department of Defense employees are also off for federal holidays.

Wonder how federal employees would feel if the holiday was unpaid? I know that not getting paid for not working would be something new and hard to swallow...

Maybe all federal employees should forego their paid holidays this year so that the US could wage an extra 3 or 4 days war in Iraq.

Before someone rightly points out that this thread has nothing to do with the war in Iraq, let me state that I was just trying to give some real reference to what a billion dollars is to the entire annual expenditure of the federal government. Compare the costs and benefits to millions of workers getting 10 holidays a year to the costs and benefits of 3 or 4 days of waging war.

Having read Fuse's last post more carefully, I see that he said that the billion dollar figure was for each of ther holidays. My statments above then shoul be altered to say "a month" of war instead of "3 or 4 days." (I'll try to find a more exact daily dollar cost of waging the war in Iraq.)

"Reuters also reports that a Marine Corps spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Roseann Lynch, said Monday that the war is costing the US about $4.5 billion a month in military "operating costs," not including procurement of new weapons and equipment." - Christian Science Monitor, January 10, 2006

This figure give the war costing $1 billion every 6.7 days, "not including procurement of new weapons and equipment." The same article, however, gives a projection of $2 trillion for the war up to 2010, included the disability payments for the 16,000 wounded US soldiers, about 20 per cent of whom suffer serious brain or spinal injuries. (Even them, this is a conservative estimate, unless one assumes that no more military will get those types of injuries. Remember, too, that this article is already a year old.


US costs to support the Iraq war are likely to top 110 billion dollars in the current fiscal year, White House budget director Rob Portman said Tuesday. - SpaceWar.com, Dec 19, 2006

$2+ billion a week

As the United States spends about $8 billion a month in Iraq, the military is being forced to cut costs in ways big and small. McClatchy Newspapers

$1 billion every 4 days

I'm not really clear how much a billion dollars is but the United States — our United States — is spending $5.6 billion a month fighting this war in Iraq that we never should have gotten into. - 60 Minutes commentary by CBS News correspondent Andy Rooney, Broadcast 10/02/05

$1 billion every 6 days

In billions of budgeted dollars

Iraq 2001 & 2002/$2.5....2003/$51.0....2004/$77.3....2005/$87.3....2007/$100.4 ....Total through 2006 $318.5
- Source: “The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11,” Amy Belasco, Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, RL33110, p. CRS-4); and Center for Defense Information, “Defense Budget Tutorial: So, You Think You Know the Cost of the Wars?”

That was very impressive DG , thanx.