If you want to understand better why so many states””from New York to Wisconsin to California””are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.
It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers. Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees. Is it any wonder that so many states and cities cannot pay their bills?
Every state in America today except for two””Indiana and Wisconsin””has more government workers on the payroll than people manufacturing industrial goods.
Not surprisingly, the WSJ chooses not to focus on all the American corporations which moved manufacturing overseas to take advantage of the near slave-labor in China, India, and the countries of Central and South America. Meanwhile, they make even more money in this country with all sorts of tax breaks, and other schemes which permit to engage in dubious business practices at the expense of their customers. One wonders why the guardians of this blog always regale us with the ideological tripe of the propaganda organ of corporate America.
I resent the author’s implication that those who “collect government payckecks” don’t earn them. I’ve been employed in public and private sectors of the economy, and I’ve never worked so hard for so little as when I was a civil servant. Shifting the blame for the figures cited in the article on to the workers, rather than the politicians and executives who got the US into this situation is reprehensible. As the above commenter noted, this is nothng but Wall St propaganda.
acroamaticus, the facts are, that those who choose to work in the public sector knew when they took those jobs, that those jobs were supposed to pay less, in exchange for more job security. Frankly, the majority of US citizens resent the implication that they, as the employees of the public sector don’t have a right to be offended by the incessant demands for more, more, more, and the outrageous condescension they are treated with, when they demand that public sector workers actually have to climb down from the ivory tower and share in the sacrifice. Look around in the real world, your neighbors, across this country are being pushed out into the street. They are losing their homes, being evicted from their apartments, and facing being shoved down between the cracks. I used to be a liberal democrat and used to respect the labor movement, but I haven’t seen one shred of compassion or empathy for those less fortunate, including unemployed citizens and the elderly and disabled on fixed incomes trying to keep a roof over their heads, when public workers demand that taxes be raised to pay for the obscene benefits packages, perks, pensions and salaries.
Perhaps you ought to snap out of it and consider how your peers in the private sector have been slandered as lazy, not competitive enough, and those claims have been baseless. They’ve been fired and replaced with cheap foreign labor, and had their taxes increased to pay to educate and train those substandard cheap foreign workers, brought here based on CVs and resumes that were fraudulent. On top of that, those citizens desperate to get some little help from our safety net programs are denied help, because those safety net programs, like rental assistance and section 8 housing are closed to new applicants, because they’re being used to subsidize that cheap foreign labor. If anyone has a right to gripe, it’s private sector workers, the backbone who built and shouldered the burden of paying you the wages, and benefits you sneer at. There are families with children, our veterans, elderly, including elderly women, who are homeless tonight, freezing out on the streets, and they don’t deserve it. They did nothing to deserve the callous and cruel treatment they are receiving because of the not so tender mercies of the Obama administration and greedy and corrupt public employees. You need to thank the Lord you have a roof over your head, and aren’t in their place right now. Perhaps open your eyes up, and climb down from your tower and do something to help those less fortunate, instead of coddling your overblown sense of entitlement.
[Comment deleted by Elf]
Whether govt workers actually work is immaterial. We are moving to the Kremlin model, very rapidly. This is the socialist agenda. The fiction of govt is that some live off the hard work of others. The only reason this country has risen to what it was and may still be is throught the hard work and RISK inherent in business. Govt is a necessary evil.
Someone wrote, perhaps on this blog, that things are dire when the people begin to fear the govt. That is exactly where we are.
Well, one source of the problem is the quantity of laws, rules and regulations passed. Often at the requests of citizens who want the government (at all levels} to protect them, often from their own lack of judgment. You can’t have laws, rules and regulations without regulators and the resulting increase in government.
So where to cut? Which laws, rules and regulations do you want to do away with?
Margaret Thatcher said it best – “The problem with Socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other peoples money”.
The alternative to government workers is either oursourcing of the work they do or eliminating the need for it to get done. Lots of wolves are licking their chops at the prospect of being the middleman providing outsourced services. On the other hand what do you want your neighbor to give up that you, also, will be fine to do without when you suddenly need (or crave) it?
The article gives the idea that you can provide the services citizens demand on the cheap. If labor were so cheap most of us “middle class” folk would still have an Irish maid working for us for a room in the attic, sharing with us the meals she’s prepared, and happy for the evening off every week and one day a month we allow her. The au pairs my friends have nowadays aren’t so cheap as labor was 75 or 100 years ago. The author needs to extrapolate that into the services citizens expect of government and draw new conclusions.
Citizens need to expect less of govt. Govt is a poor provider of any but rudimentary services. Fire, defense, and very few other things ought to be in their repertoir.
Govt only grows at taxpayer expense and has no consumer group to regulate their size. All consumers of govt are captive payers. Govt lives and expands itself at will – result is that taxpayers pay – regardless of how inefficient or bloated or useless the service.
We can demand that govt provide everything. After all, aren’t nearly all the things we consume “necessities.” Democracy will last just until the citizenry votes itself largesse. That is exactly where we are now.
9, as you say. If you take the King’s coin (or services) you do the King’s bidding.
BTW – the citizenry voting themselves largesse
………… courtesy of Thomas Jefferson ………… only took 250 yrs.
The problem here is that gov. work doesn’t produce anything. We need to produce “things” is we are to produce value. Our entire enconomy hangs on this simple fact. And we have outsourced most of out “thing” production. Services don’t create value. They burn it. Larry