Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Another Step In the Wrong Direction
From today's Wall Street Journal:
Last week, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform approved a bill to provide paid parental leave to federal workers and thus make government employment more attractive.
Great. Just frigg'n great. My business is shot all to hell, revenues are down 75% or more, and a majority of the Members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government... er... Reform... want to take my money - all while borrowing more money from China and other foreign nations in my (our) name which ultimately it's my responsibility (and yours) to pay back... with interest - so as to make government "service" more attractive.
Hey... as a taxpayer and citizen, aren't I a "stakeholder" with regard to government? Don't these people working for government work for... er... me? (Me and you?)
News flash: I don't want to provide "my" employees PAID "parental leave." I don't want to pay them to NOT work! Call me cheap... call me mean spirited... but I've got a better idea for "my" government employees:
OPEN SAVINGS ACCOUNTS!!!
SAVE SOME FRIGG'N MONEY!!!
Take SOME responsibility for YOUR OWN LIVES...!!!
My God... this is insanity. Government spending is running at huge - with no end in sight - deficits, debt is piled upon debt, future liabilities are unsustainable... yet what the hell... pile on more spending! Take the money from me... give it to someone else. Doesn't matter if that "someone else" makes more a year than I do... has better benefits than I do... gets more paid vacation and a superior retirement plan... apparently none of this matters.
Another news flash: Government "service" is popular enough already without offering further... er... inducements. While private sector job losses for April totaled some 611,000 jobs, government went on a hiring spree, hiring 66,000 people.
God help us... God help us... God help us... God help us...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
A follow-up (of sorts) from today's (May 14) WSJ:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124227027965718333.html
Excerpting:
Across the private sector, workers are swallowing hard as their employers freeze salaries, cancel bonuses, and institute longer work days. America's employees can see for themselves how steeply business has fallen off, which is why many are accepting cost-saving measures with equanimity....But then there is the U.S. public sector...
In New Jersey, which faces a $3.3 billion budget deficit, angry state workers have demonstrated in Trenton and taken Gov. Jon Corzine to court over his plan to require unpaid furloughs for public employees. In New York, public-sector unions have hit the airwaves with caustic ads denouncing Gov. David Paterson's promise to lay off state workers if they continue refusing to forgo wage hikes as part of an effort to close a $17.7 billion deficit. In Los Angeles County, where the schools face a budget deficit of nearly $600 million, school employees have balked at a salary freeze and vowed to oppose any layoffs that the board of education says it will have to pursue if workers don't agree to concessions.
Call it a tale of two economies. Private-sector workers -- unionized and nonunion alike -- can largely see that without compromises they may be forced to join unemployment lines. Not so in the public sector. Government unions used their influence this winter in Washington to ensure that a healthy chunk of the federal stimulus package was sent to states and cities to preserve public jobs. Now they are fighting tenacious and largely successful local battles to safeguard salaries and benefits. Their gains, of course, can only come at the expense of taxpayers, which is one reason why states and cities are approving tens of billions of dollars in tax increases.
It's not as if we haven't seen this coming. When the movement among public-sector workers to unionize began gathering momentum in the 1950s, some critics, including private-sector labor leaders such as George Meany, observed that government is a monopoly not subject to the discipline of the marketplace. Allowing these workers - many already protected by civil-service law - to organize and bargain collectively might ultimately give them the power to hold politicians and taxpayers hostage.
Today, public-sector unions sit atop lists of organizations that devote the most money to lobbying and campaign contributions.
In Pennsylvania, a local think tank, the Commonwealth Foundation, counted the resources of the state's teachers union a few years ago. It had 11 regional offices, 275 employees and $66 million in annual dues....And in California, unions spent more than $50 million in 2005 to defeat a series of ballot proposals that would have capped growth in the state's budget.
The results of such efforts are evident in the rich rewards that public-sector employees now enjoy. A study in 2005 by the nonpartisan Employee Benefit Research Institute estimated that the average public-sector worker earned 46% more in salary and benefits than comparable private-sector workers. The gap has only continued to grow. For example, state and local worker pay and benefits rose 3.1% in the last year, compared to 1.9% in the private sector, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).Some five million private-sector workers have lost their jobs in the last year alone, and their unemployment rate is above 9% according to the BLS. By contrast, public-sector employment has grown in virtually every month of the recession, and the jobless rate for government workers is a mere 2.8%. For anyone who thinks such low unemployment numbers are good news, remember that the bulging public sector must be paid for with revenues that most governments don't currently have. This is one reason for a spate of state and local tax increases, such as $5 billion in tax increases New York state passed in April, and $12 billion in tax increases California's legislature agreed to in February...Folks... we're in deep $hit.
Post a Comment