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Michael Barone: It’s a Wonderful Life Working for the Government
It looks like a happy new year for you — if you’re a public employee.
That’s the takeaway from a recent Rasmussen poll that shows that 46 percent of government employees say the economy is getting better, while just 31 percent say it’s getting worse. In contrast, 32 percent of those with private-sector jobs say the economy is getting better, while 49 percent say it is getting worse.
Nearly half — 44 percent — of government employees rate their personal finances as good or excellent. Only 33 percent of private-sector employees do.
It sounds like public- and private-sector employees are looking at different Americas. And they are.
Private-sector employment peaked at 115.8 million in December 2007, when the recession officially began. It was down to 108.5 million last November. That’s a 6 percent decline.
Public-sector employment peaked at 22.6 million in August 2008. It fell a bit in 2009, then rebounded to 22.5 million in November. That’s less than a 1 percent decline.
This is not an accident — it is the result of deliberate public policy. About one-third of the $787 million stimulus package passed in February was directed at state and local governments, which have been facing declining revenues and are, mostly, required to balance their budgets.
The policy aim, Democrats say, was to maintain public services and aid. The political aim, although Democrats don’t say so, was to maintain public-sector jobs — and the flow of union dues to the public-employee unions that represent nearly 40 percent of public-sector workers.
Those unions, in turn, have contributed generously to Democrats. Service Employees International Union head Andy Stern, the most frequent nongovernment visitor to the Obama White House, has boasted that his union steered $60 million to Democrats in the 2008 cycle. The total union contribution to Democrats has been estimated at $400 million.
In effect, some significant portion of the stimulus package can be regarded as taxpayer funding of the Democratic Party. Needless to say, no Republicans need apply.
One must concede that there is something to the argument that maintaining government spending levels helps people in need and provides essential public services. Something, but not everything. For it’s more difficult to cut waste and unnecessary spending from government agencies than from private-sector businesses.
As Charles Peters, founder of the neoliberal Washington Monthly, noted years ago, when government is ordered to cut spending, it does things like close the Washington Monument to visitors. Tourists from the 50 states and 435 congressional districts quickly squawk to their members of Congress, and the spending cuts are rescinded.
When businesses must cut, they do so with an eye to profits — which is to say with an eye to providing consumers with goods and services they need enough to be willing to pay for. They tend to lay off unproductive employees while striving to retain productive ones.
Governments, restrained by civil service rules and often by union contracts, do not have similar incentives.
As for the argument that maintaining government payrolls pumps money into the private-sector economy — well, where does that government money come from? From private-sector employees and employers or from those who buy government bonds and who must be repaid by government in the future.
At some point — and this already has occurred in much of Western Europe — public-sector spending tends to choke off private-sector growth. America’s current high unemployment levels have been commonplace in much of Western Europe for the past 25 years.
The question now is whether they will become commonplace in the United States in the decade ahead. The decision by the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress to hold public-sector employees in place while the private sector is gravely weakened has the potential to put us on that trajectory.
The unemployment data show that this recession has had a much greater impact on private-sector workers than on public employees, on men than on women, on blue-collar workers than on white-collar employees.
This seems not to have gone unnoticed. Democrats have been surprised that so many downscale voters oppose their big-spending programs. Maybe many of those voters have noticed how much of that spending has gone to public-sector union members, leaving the rest of America with a less-than-happy new year.
— Michael Barone is a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report and principal coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics. Click here to contact him.
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» on 01.01.10 @ 04:08 AM
The gov salaries should be cut in half—along with staff???
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» on 01.01.10 @ 09:20 AM
What’s interesting is that the Dem’s are supported and funded by large corporations (much like the Republicans). Having said that, I agree that the local, state and Federal governments should reduce services and balance their budgets, just like the rest of us who pay for their salaries and programs with our tax dollars.
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» on 01.02.10 @ 02:58 PM
Of course, there’s another way of looking at this.
Yes, Barone’s “private sector” has had tough sledding lately.
Its executives and financiers had to operate for eight long years in as de-regulated an environment as Bush-Cheney-Gringrich-Hastert-Frist-McConnell could conjure.
The end result was Wall Street derivative “scrip” that proved to be bubble-bloated
worthless. Banks, brokerage, accounting, construction, real estate in collapse.
Legions of bankruptcies and mass layoffs, and all those marvelous “overseas outsourcing” episodes.
But didn’t the latter help Barone’s companies “protect” their quarterlies, at the expense of their employees, and all the communities where the mothballed or out-sourced plants used to be.
Barone’s public sector might not have fared much better, when Bush’s stuff hit the fan in 2008, EXCEPT that the Federal Civil Service Act of 120 years ago protected regular federal employees from politically based layoffs.
Barone should consider that in those ancient times, it was the Republicans (Chester A. Arthur) who signed in Civil Service. The Republicans (Sherman, then TR) who fought the monopolies and trusts on behalf of average investors and workers.
Yes, Michael, there was a distant time when Republicans were not (yet) the Party of
No.
As recently as Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Bush-1, the elephant herd still had ideas to make America fairer, more competitive, safer, cleaner, generally better. Often were passed into law, with support from BOTH parties.
And hey, they did it before. They could do it again. If ... they get some fresh people
with some new ideas for a new century. Right?
Contrast that to the weekly tv appearances by the dark, gloomy “suits” who rep your
party and philosophy now: McConnell, Boehner, Inhofe, Ensign, DeMint.
That’s the dumpiest, nastiest sounding group since the last days of Brezhnev’s old
Politburo.
So if the private sector’s been hurting lately, Mr. Barone, ask yourself - wasn’t it from the license of hundreds of overpaid corporate pubahs and financiers doing
exactly what YOU and your friends on the Hill had been encouraging them to do to
the economy for years?
Any chance that you, or they, bear any major responsibility for this downturn we’ve
been slowly moving through?
Think about it.
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» on 01.03.10 @ 11:43 PM
So Publius how is your rant related to Mr. Barone’s piece?
Perhaps the title of your editorial should be, “How many hackneyed adjectives can I use in a 358 word essay?” Daniel Petry
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» on 01.04.10 @ 07:25 AM
Danny, Pulius hasn’t got a freaking clue what is going on. Yes P there was a time. There was a time when our government did a lot of things. There was a time they actually spent 12% of the GDP on transportation (compared to 2% now), but then there was a time when we as a country and economy had a trade surplus and no national debt. There was a time when we EARNED what we spent. There was a time when we took responsibility for what we did. There was a time when we valued life more than convenience and honor over fame.
Publius and many on the left have been so inculcated in to hatred of the “private sector” by their Marxist leaders that they seldom realize the private sector is the source of the wealth that funds the lefts favorite causes. No the money may flow from government, but the wealth that backs that money is done by the “private sector” and particularly by that private sector that creates value, like resource extraction (yep that’s oil) and manufacturing ( you know making the crap you like to buy, instead of doing it in China).
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» on 01.06.10 @ 06:45 PM
AN50 - this is an excellent quote: “Publius and many on the left have been so inculcated in to hatred of the “private sector” by their Marxist leaders that they seldom realize the private sector is the source of the wealth that funds the lefts favorite causes….”
Perfectly said. Daniel Petry
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