I’ve repeatedly explained that Keynesian economics doesn’t work because any money the government spends must first be diverted from the productive sector of the economy, which means either higher taxes or more red ink. So unless one actually thinks that politicians spend money with high levels of effectiveness and efficiency, this certainly suggests that growth […]

I can say with great confidence that government bureaucrats are overpaid compared to people in the productive sector of the economy. Why am I sure that this is true, particularly when the so-called Federal Salary Council claims bureaucrats are underpaid? For the simple reason that the “job opening and labor turnover” data from the Department […]

Check out some of the ridiculous details about the woman who has earned the title of California’s Golden Bureaucrat. Alameda County supervisors have really taken to heart the adage that government should run like a business — rewarding County Administrator Susan Muranishi with the Wall Street-like wage of $423,664 a year. For the rest of […]

When I first read this story in the Washington Post about supposedly under-appreciated federal bureaucrats, I was tempted to focus on the sentence referring to “the sledgehammer of budget cuts scheduled to hit today.” Is the Washington Post so biased and/or clueless that reporters really think that a 1.2 percent reduction in overall spending for […]

The Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards put together a remarkable (and depressing) chart showing that federal bureaucrats get almost twice the level of compensation as workers in the productive sector of the economy. Defenders of the bureaucracy (including a federal pay panel dominated by bureaucrats) claim that government employees actually are underpaid because…well…just because. My modest […]

Since I’ve been in Washington from more than 25 years, it takes something really remarkable to shock me. But when I read today that federal bureaucrats are supposedly underpaid, notwithstanding all the evidence to the contrary, I thought somebody had sent me an article from the Onion. But then I saw that the assertion of […]

I’ve certainly complained about Obamacare from a fiscal perspective, warning that it means higher taxes and more spending. And I’ve also warned that it will make our health care system less efficient and could lead to some of the horrifying examples of rationing and poor care that you find in the United Kingdom (scroll to […]