CURIOUSLY, THAT’S THE ONE CONTINGENT OF VOTERS BIDEN DOESN’T NEED TO WORRY ABOUT: Biden Gives Bureaucrats Biggest Pay Bump Since The Carter* Admin As Americans Feel Crushed By Inflation.

Beginning in January, federal civilian employees will see their salaries increase by the largest percentage since the Carter administration.

President Joe Biden signed an executive order in December giving federal employees an average of a 5.2% increase in pay, the largest increase since former President Jimmy Carter raised federal salaries by 9.1% in 1980. Meanwhile, Americans are dealing with inflation and a generally poor economy, with some blaming high government spending, according to recent polling.

Seventy-six percent of Americans reported that their income is not keeping up with inflation, according to a poll conducted by CBS News and YouGov this month. Fifty-six percent of Americans polled felt government spending, like the pay increases Biden is giving to federal bureaucrats, is causing high inflation.

Federal employees will see a 4.7% pay increase across the board as well as an additional bump, averaging 0.5%, depending on where they are based. Federal workers in the San Francisco area, for instance, will get an additional 0.9% raise, according to the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

Members of the armed forces will also receive an average pay bump of 5.2% in the coming year, per the National Defense Authorization Act. Their pay increase, however, was approved by Congress through the  while the pay increase for civilian bureaucrats was implemented unilaterally by Biden.

“The Federal government is the nation’s largest employer and must ensure it has the talent to meet the needs of the American people,” a spokesperson for the Office of Management and Budget told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Imagine the sort of staffers we’d be stuck with if the Federal government were underfunded, crazed GOP fiscal hatchet men!

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* Carter, you say? Biden Knew Carter Was in Trouble in 1979. Now He’s in the Same Boat.

“That man’s in trouble, politically in trouble,” Joe Biden said of then-President Jimmy Carter in July 1979, according to an account at the time in the Wilmington Evening Journal. Biden had held off on publicly backing Carter because he wanted to endorse a candidate who would ensure Democrats retained the White House in the 1980 election. “I’m not certain that’s Jimmy Carter right now,” he told the paper.

Biden was in a position to know. He held a leadership post in Carter’s successful 1976 presidential bid after becoming the first sitting U.S. senator to endorse him. Biden eventually backed Carter’s failed 1980 re-election bid, and the bond they formed early in Biden’s career lasted through a large part of their lives.

Now Biden is himself in the White House and stumbling in some of the same ways as Carter as he sets out to win a second term. Both men struggled to sell legislative victories and retain the party’s core voters as high inflation and foreign-policy disasters eroded their support. And both men had a disconnect with voters that’s leaving Democrats afraid that Biden could share Carter’s political fate of being a one-term president.

“They both have made important decisions that are substantively in the interests of the country—but when they charge up the hill and they look behind them, there are not a hell of a lot of people following,” said Jonathan Alter, a Carter biographer. “Biden is experiencing some of the basic leadership challenges that Carter did where he’s losing his connection to the American people as Carter did.”

To be fair, as this 1978 campaign ad highlights, that Biden, or at least his comms team back then, was slightly more astute about shifting his message to appeal to his then-voters’ concerns: How Biden Stopped Worrying and Learned To Love Inflation.