Despite years of talk by Democrats and Republicans about the need to control spending, farm out work to private businesses and make government finances more transparent, the opposite has occurred.
Rather than becoming leaner, the state work force increased by 7.1 percent since 2005 — outpacing Oregon’s population growth.
The number of top state employees earning more than $100,000 a year more than doubled during the past decade.
The headline presupposes that it can’t. Of course, it can. Any local, state, or the federal government [i]can[/i] downsize. The question is will it?
Many parts of our nation are going to have to come to grips with the issue of wants v. needs. Like the size of the average home, our sense of what is a need has increased far beyond what is sustainable. This will be intensely painful for a long while, as the corresponding level of delusion is extremely high.
Oregon; little Greece.
And people need to reclaim power and re-learn to do things for themselves that they have let the state do for them.
But Br. M, how do you do that? I assume you are right, but the truth seems to be that “You can’t get theyah from heah.” as they say ’round heah. Larry
I think the chief of Intel was correct that the left hasn’t realized that its massive Keynsian experiment has failed. He made this statement about Washington State, however, Oregon has marched to pretty much the same drum as it’s northern neighbor.
All this state largesse has to be paid for and you can only “soak the rich” so far until they move their homes and businesses somewhere else that is more economically feasible for them.