Unemployed? Blame Public Employees

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

I have a hypothesis about the “New Normal” economy we face. Most, if not all, of the unemployment crisis can be blamed on Public Employees. A bold statement to some…. but on paper it looks suspiciously valid.

Essentially, upper and middle taxpayers have always paid the tab for government. But historically we have paid civil servants less money. And the amount they are now overpaid is very near how much our unemployed have lost in wages.

Public employees are stealing from the poor and lower classes. Republicans need to make this message clear as day. Why they don’t astounds me. Is Chris Christie the only politician with elephant balls?

...let’s look the real lost wages of the unemployed and see how close that amount is to what we overpay for government . To do this, I pulled data from the Center for Labor Studies. First, I sorted the number of jobless in each decile of 15M unemployed, and then established how many hires would be needed to achieve Full Employment (4%) in every single decile. Then I multiplied each group by their median lost wages.

Overpaid: $369 BILLION. Lost Wages: $306 BILLION.

Holy [smoke], huh? Turns out this stuff isn’t complicated. Pay public employees too much money, and you don’t have enough cash left over to run the economy at full capacity.

And guess what? When we have Full Employment, we won’t need $800B in stimulus either. Say it with me… Obamajobs are not real jobs.

The deeper explanation that our economy is the fault of Public Employees goes like this:

1. Reagan (bless his soul) made one giant unforced error. Starting in 1980, he allowed public employees to start earning more than private sector employees. If only he’d fought the communists here like he fought the Ruskies (sigh, one can only dream).

2. Starting in the early 90’s,the Internet and technology brought massive productivity gains to private enterprise that resulted in jaw-dropping cool stuff and dramatically lower prices…. so even though wages stayed the same for some, the lifestyle improvement of all people over the last 20 years has been outstanding. A $50 broadband connection and a $400 computer basically silences any complaint that someone doesn’t have the tools they need to succeed.

3. Government has not made these productivity gains, and on top of it, their wages have increased.

If however, we got started in the late 90’s, when it became obvious to anyone with three functioning brain cells that computers could replace humans and lower costs, we wouldn’t have seen a short-term crash in the technology markets. By 2000, we could have cut $200B from public compensation. Taxpayers could have kept $150B of that and spent $50B with technology and service companies as government jobs were automated, outsourced, and privatized. Same services, lower costs. Not less government. More productive government.

Now watch this: If GOV2.0 happened back then, there was no tech crash, and Greenspan wouldn’t have destroyed his place in history by creating an easy money housing bubble–which has now roped tens of millions of suckers into making huge mortgage payments on “investments” they will never get back.

It is a pretty compelling alternative universe.

And this story shows exactly what Republicans must place at Bush’s feet: No matter what else positive happened during his eight years, he was a Harvard MBA in the middle a giant era of modernization. And his not fighting tooth and nail against the explosion of public employee compensation was unconscionable – look what it has brought us to!

On the bright side, even in 2011 when we finally make these cuts, when $100B in new revenue is annually floating to technology and service companies instead of $400B being stolen by Public Employees, we won’t worry about what kind of future jobs we need to create – we have a logically valid way to create the new jobs now.

http://biggovernment.com/mwarstler/2010/08/18/unemployed-blame-public-employees/#more-158641

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

When in doubt, blame the workers

Published: 02:52 p.m., Friday, August 13, 2010

It's such a pain. Why can't we just fire more people?

That's the mood when it comes to state employees. It's considered a serious inconvenience that public workers have powerful unions and thus aren't considered disposable, like the majority of people who work for a living.

It's easy to see where this comes from. The state is a mess, with huge deficits. And with tens of thousands of generously compensated people on the state payroll, they're an easy target. The state has exhausted its stable of gimmicks to pass a budget each year.

But we only ever hear one perspective, and it's never the viewpoint of people in line to lose their jobs. Even with unemployment numbers high and showing no signs of ebbing, the message is the same -- it's all the workers' fault.

And things would be so much better if only we could add thousands of public employees to the unemployment line.

It doesn't have to be this way. Strong union protections do not lead to an underperforming economy. There are examples around the world and in our own history that prove that.

There are two issues here -- public employees, like teachers and police officers, who have union protections, and workers in the private sector, who more often do not. Why, people in the private sector are asked, should those workers be secure while your job could go at any time?

It's a way of setting people who have the same interest against one another. Everyone who works for a living has an interest in fair pay, decent benefits and job security. By playing people who have those benefits against people who don't, only employers win.

This is called being "pro-business," and no one running for office would ever want to be called anything else. Connecticut, you see, is "anti-business." We have workers here who aren't subject to lose their jobs on a whim. We have regulations that mandate certain workplace standards, which some people believe ought to be a baseline, not a privilege. But none of that is very "business-friendly."

The attack on workers is part of a decades-long campaign to make people believe every public sector activity is corrupt, and taxes must not, under any circumstances, ever be raised. Taxes kill the economy, always, and they never pay for services of any value. Ever.

It's a philosophy belied by the fact that we've had a productive economy alongside high taxes in the past. Throughout the 1950s, that magical era that conservatives always hearken back to, the top marginal tax rate topped 90 percent. Today, anti-tax dogmatists tell us the world will end if that rate reverts to 39.6 percent, as is scheduled.

The richest people always have the loudest voices, and they have spent generations convincing the rest of us that lowering taxes on them is in everyone's best interests. So that's what we've done for the last 50 years.

It's helped some people -- the ultra-rich. As for everyone else, take a look at the service cuts in store here and around the country as budgets continue to tighten. Hawaii, for example, went to a four-day school week to save money. Think that puts some stress on working parents?

None of this means there isn't bloat in state government. There's waste in any enterprise of a certain size, public or private.

But the long-run stagnation of the middle and lower classes in this country is directly tied to a reduced tax burden on the very richest. We can argue about how much people should be expected to pay in taxes, but we shouldn't question the consequences of decades of cuts.

We're told, of course, that the real problem today is that taxes are too high, and regulations too tight. And that it's all workers' fault.

And we continue to fall for it.

Hugh S. Bailey is assistant editorial page editor at the Connecticut Post. He can be reached at 203-330-6233 or at hbailey@ctpost.com.

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

Platitudes only? No charts or graphs?

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

Platitudes only? No charts or graphs?

Here you go, some visual aid for you. He's got you hooked on that, eh?

[BobandXiaomei 14]

"... instead of $400B being stolen by Public Employees..."

Have you filed a criminal complaint with the DA? If you can identify the employees stealing they need to be prosecuted.