Plunging Towards Gomorrah
Where’s My Bailout?
I suppose this will be the Climate Change Project Manager's office. Nice six-figure BS job if you can get it.
With the economy still in the tank and unemployment continuing to hover around ten percent, a lot of people are starting to wonder, “Where’s my bailout?” Well, if you look at the salary and employment stats in the public sector (city, county, state and federal government) you’ll see exactly where your bailout went.
Your bailout – or at least your hard-earned tax dollars that are partially funding the corporate fat-cat bailouts (the other portion being financed by the Chinese, among others) – is also being used to create make-work six-figure nonsense jobs, such as Climate Change Program Manager at the National Park Service. This ridiculous job, with a pay scale between $103,000 and $155,000, is just the tip of the iceberg (pun intended). According to the Dec. 11, 2009 edition of USA Today:
Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession’s first 18 months — and that’s before overtime pay and bonuses are counted. Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time — in pay and hiring — during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector… When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000.
Moreover, the New York Times reported in August of 2009 that while the private sector lost 6.9 million jobs, state and local governments added 110,000 new jobs. All of this data – and it goes on and on and on, if you care to look into it – strikes me as horribly backwards.
I’m no economist, but if deficits are skyrocketing and companies are looking for relief so they can begin hiring again, wouldn’t logic dictate that government cut jobs, siphoning those people into the private sector, while providing tax incentives to individuals and private sector companies?
In December of 2009, 382,758 federal employees were making $100,000 or more annually. That’s more than $38 billion in what is largely bureaucratic largesse. Last I checked it’s the private sector that actually produces our GDP, not government jobs that essentially produce nothing. That’s a lot of nothing we’re getting for our billions.
Why we’re headed down the same road as western Europe, California, Massachusetts, New York, etc., etc., which ultimately leads to economic crisis and bankruptcy, I’ll never know. Or, maybe I do know…
It’s all about power and payoffs. The more the private sector and citizens cede to the state, the more power and money that’s funneled to the state and its dependants. It’s simple mathematics with the additional wild card of human nature (it’s corrupt, by the way).
While some see this as a Utopian system, rational people recognize that an all-powerful, controlling state destroys liberty and freedom. The explosive growth of public sector payrolls and jobs is simply another data point in a trend line that shows America headed toward the abyss. If you’re not concerned about it, you should be.
| Print article | This entry was posted by club soda on March 3, 2010 at 7:14 pm, and is filed under Economics, Fascism, Politics. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
about 4 months ago
I’m amazed you’re getting so exercised about a couple of positions within the federal government to help us better understand how human activity and climate change are impacting special natural and cultural resources. You don’t think pollution and climate change are impacting plants and animals in our national parks? You don’t think minimal government efforts to protect these special places are worth it? The private sector should provide the bulk of jobs in this nation, and is the engine that drives the economy, but no private sector company wants to take on the task of protecting (nor should they) one of this nation’s greatest assets – our national parks. That’s clearly an appropriate role for the federal government. Less ranting…more common sense.
about 4 months ago
I think Club Soda is using this position as an example of a worthless position. The Forest Service in general is a terrible bureaucracy for a variety of reasons. Randal O’Toole is a great resource in this area. However, I think your comment provides an insight into why government grows unchecked. We can complain all we want about the size and incompetence of government or we can complain that the average citizens don’t seem to know that National Parks are run inefficiently.
The Forest Service isn’t doing a good job. Please provide an example of a government agency that does a good job. This climate change position is worthless. It springs from the imagination of some hopelessly ill informed civil servant.
about 4 months ago
Not as exercised (exorcised? excised?) about a couple of positions as I am about almost 400,000 federal employees making more than six figures, knowing full well that most of those jobs could be cut with no impact whatsoever on any American citizen’s standard of living. In fact, it would make it better because the feds could then lower our taxes. You may have missed the point, which is that a growing government is hazardous to the average citizen’s freedom. By the way, the climate has been changing now for the past 4 billion years or so, but I guess the NPS is just now figuring that out. I’d recommend a good meteoroligist and perhaps a solar scientist and leave it at that.