Posts tagged 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.