The work that Shaun O’Connell does is required by law, yet now he’s sidelined by the government shutdown.
O’Connell reviews disability claims for the Social Security Administration in New York, checking that no one’s gaming the system, while ensuring people with legitimate medical problems are compensated properly.
Billions of dollars are at stake with this kind of work, yet O’Connell is considered a nonessential employee for purposes of the partial government shutdown.
“If you stick with the semantics of essential and nonessential, you could easily be offended,” says O’Connell, who has worked for Social Security for 20 years.
Why is it I have very little sympathy for unionized, pampered, overpaid and over compensated government workers who can’t be fired if they are incompetent or even if they commit a crime and are going to get paid for any time they miss even though they aren’t working? Gosh. I think I just answered my own question
EL OH EL !!!!
Yes, David Keller, but not all federal employees match that description. Amongst the problems there are also some dedicated and effective people doing useful things.
[i]Amongst the problems there are also some dedicated and effective people doing useful things[/i]
Oh my, our ever expansive Government is chock full of people doing useful things. In fact our Government funds non-profits to go out and find clients for numerous Government agencies so they can do even more useful things.
A couple of years ago I took the Federal Budget [remember when we used to do those] and put it through this filter: keep the things articulated by the Constitution.
Guess what? With that filter you can make 2/3 of the Government disapprear. Those “useful” folks can then go be useful at the state level or in the private marketplace where they will not be pampered unless they produce!
A fellow parishioner, a conservative Anglican, works for the Agriculture Department on identifying and keeping serious foreign plant pathogens out of our agricultural system. Sounds useful to me. No doubt, #4, #1, there’s lots of waste, inefficiency, and unnecessary “work” going on at the federal level. Not all of it, though, should be thrown out in the trash.
There is a lot in the Federal Government we could do without – though some should be replaced by the states or local governments. However there are a lot of lower level government employees for whom this delay in their paychecks will be a big deal. Part of the problem is that it is basically impossible to (thoughtfully) actually cut something out that the federal government does.
#5, someone who keeps foreign plant pathogens out of our agricultural system sounds like someone who is protecting the country. That is defined as a duty of the Federal Government in the Constitution. Doesn’t sound useful, sounds essential.
#6, [i]Part of the problem is that it is basically impossible to (thoughtfully) actually cut something out that the federal government does.[/i]
No in fact it is quite easy: here are two ways to do it. First, the Constitutional Filter. Very objective, pretty straight forward.
Where that doesn’t clarify sufficiently, we Christians can fall back on the principle of Subsidiarity, first defined by Thomas Aquinas I believe: let entities closest to the problem, solve the problem. Communities used to take care of education, the poor, the sick, the homeless. Now we have a bloated Federal bureaucracy trying to do this from long distance and with its own welfare in mind. The principle of Subsidiarity would shred what was left after the Constitutional filter had done its work.
Through all this we would have a Fed Govt doing what it is SUPPOSED TO DO, most of which would be transparent to most of us on a daily basis as we went about our work of being as fruitful and prosperous as we can with the great swath of freedom we had to work with.