This blog repeatedly has chronicled the huge discrepancy between the gold-plated compensation for government employees and the meager salaries and benefits of people in the productive sector of the economy, including a video conclusively demonstrating that bureaucrats are overpaid.
This message is now resonating all across the nation. Even the New York Times, as shown by the excerpt below, now realizes that taxpayers are sick and tired of paying exorbitant taxes to finance excessive pay for the bureaucracy.
But public awareness is only a small step in the right direction. What really matters is public policy. Will the bureaucracy be downsized? Will salaries be frozen for several years? Will absurd pension plans be replaced by 401(k) systems? And what will happen to unaffordable health plans for government workers?
We’re going to see some interesting battles at the state and local level. One of the many great things about federalism is we get an opportunity to see some governments do the right thing and some do the wrong thing. And as we watch states like California descend into bankruptcy, this teaches everyone about the policies that should be avoided.
But the long-overdue day of reckoning won’t happen if Obama and the other politicians figure out how to bail out reckless state and local governments. That’s already happened once, since funneling federal money to the states was one of main goals of Obama’s failed stimulus.
But sending more money to the states would be akin to providing an alcoholic with a case of booze. If House Republicans have any brains, they will make sure taxpayers in places like Texas don’t pay more to subsidize politicians and special interests in places such as Illinois.
Cross your fingers that they hold firm. In the meantime, let’s enjoy the change in the public mood. Here are a few passages from yesterday’s story in the New York Times.
Across the nation, a rising irritation with public employee unions is palpable, as a wounded economy has blown gaping holes in state, city and town budgets, and revealed that some public pension funds dangle perilously close to bankruptcy. In California, New York, Michigan and New Jersey, states where public unions wield much power and the culture historically tends to be pro-labor, even longtime liberal political leaders have demanded concessions — wage freezes, benefit cuts and tougher work rules. …a growing cadre of political leaders and municipal finance experts argue that much of the edifice of municipal and state finance is jury-rigged and, without new revenue, perhaps unsustainable. Too many political leaders, they argue, acted too irresponsibly, failing to either raise taxes or cut spending. A brutal reckoning awaits, they say. …Fred Siegel, a historian at the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, has written of the “New Tammany Hall,” which he describes as the incestuous alliance between public officials and labor. “Public unions have had no natural adversary; they give politicians political support and get good contracts back,” Mr. Siegel said. “It’s uniquely dysfunctional.” …In California, pension costs now crowd out spending for parks, public schools and state universities; in Illinois, spiraling pension costs threaten the state with insolvency. And taxpayer resentment simmers.
