Moving Jobs From The Private Sector To The Public Sector
By Wes Keene | April 5, 2010 | In Category: Economy
The Washington political class and liberal media alike, rejoiced at last week’s job numbers. We’ve added jobs. To be precise, we’ve added 162,000 of them. That sure sounds like a lot of jobs, but try telling that to the 9.7% of Americans who still can’t find a one. It sounds like a mathematical impossibility. We add jobs, yet our unemployment rate doesn’t even have the graciousness to budge a couple tenths of a percent for us. Well, to understand that, you have to keep in mind that new workers are entering the field everyday. People who look for work but cannot find any are, by definition, “unemployed”.
So what made up those 162,000 jobs we did get? Well you can thank Uncle Sam for a lot of them, about 29.6% of them to be exact.
“Employment in federal government was up over the month, reflecting the hiring of 48,000 temporary workers for the decennial census.”
But those are all temporary workers. What happens when the census is over? We’ve been hiring a lot of these census workers, it isn’t limited to March’s report. When those workers hit the streets again, it may make 9.7% unemployment look pretty good. Looking at census hires is only part of the picture, however. While America’s private sector has struggled, our public sector has escaped the economic turbulence, thanks to you – the taxpayer. Since one year ago, the Feds have hired 170,000. Were it not for the postal service letting some folks go, the Federal government would have taken on 51.3 thousand last month alone. If you take out the census workers that’s still 3,300 new Federal jobs in one month.
I was recently criticized in a post online for suggesting that Congress is paid too much. I was instigating “class warfare”, they said…plus the idea of making Federal officials earn market rate for their services was just “stupid” according to one participant. Perhaps that individual and other like-minded people would reconsider that position given the growing scope of Federal employment. It isn’t class warfare to wish for a Federal government that eat, sleeps, and works like its citizens do, but it might be unrealistic. No one in Washington wants to rock the boat of the ruling class that makes, on average, 45% more than us losers in the private sector.
So we are hiring more and more Federal workers, and paying them increasingly gaudy sums of money. The worst part is, that we keep electing politicians to keep it this way. For my friends who think Congress ought to keep getting regular raises because their jobs are so tough, I ask this: Why not let those people go find work in the private sector that provides those kinds of benefits? Some may succeed in doing so, some may become vastly richer working in the private sector, even. I say, let ‘em, at least we won’t be financing them.
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