Government Overhead
Seems like every year we go through this, this whole budget wrangling nightmare, and every other year there is a threatened government shut down. Republicans try for “draconian” cuts while the Democrats fight for the little guy trying to keep programs from being cut. Of course there are never any real cuts. Programs continue to increase the question is really by how much. Or at least that is what we are told. Reality is much worse.
Let’s use the business model for a moment. The analogy isn’t perfect but it will serve. In a standard business, your major expense is overhead or labor costs. When a business runs a deficit they might cut services or products that are unprofitable but the real cuts come in labor. They lay off workers.
When it comes to government we hear a lot about entitlements. These are really the services that government supplies receiving taxes as payment. The battle always seems to be over how much we want and how much we are willing to pay for it. The real question is one of overhead not services. Only recently have we begun to talk about benefits to those workers but even that is not the real problem though it is one that needs to be address. No, the real problem is how many people we have working for government. The government is the largest single employer. You might hear about cutting superfluous programs but you never hear about cutting labor and that is where we need to be making cuts.
A recent article in USA Today highlighted how Federal workers make more on average than those in the private sector. They also get better benefits. According to Dennis Cauchon’s article the “The federal government spent about $224 billion in 2008 on compensation for about 2 million civilian employees.” Perhaps a drop in the overall spending bucket but no small chunk of change.
The most interesting thing came in Chris Owen’s piece on the Hire Strategy web site. His report on the USA Today article had some interesting quotes.
"The federal workforce is more highly educated than the private workforce. Roughly a third of the private workforce has a college degree, for example, while well over 50 percent of the federal workforce does." Federal workers also have been on the job longer, and "as people gain more experience, pay tends to increase," Orszag said.
Federal workers unions are using similar lines of defense to discredit the USA Today story, arguing that federal salaries are often higher than private-sector wages because government workers are more highly skilled and specialized.
Government workers are more educated? Are we really sending our kids to college so they can become government workers? I guess so. That seems to be where the money and benefits are. Does this mean the middle class we hear so much about are government employees?
And the fact that they have been on the job longer says volumes. You can’t get rid of the bad ones and the pay and benefits are so good, no one ever leaves.
These are the people who vote. This is why you will never hear about cutting government employment. Look what happened in Wisconsin when collective bargaining was being discussed. Can you imagine the demonstrations if we started laying people off in mass? The reality is we have to. We can no longer keep an ever increasing workforce providing fewer and fewer services. Government should not be the largest single employer with a workforce making more than the private sector. I don’t want to hear about Congress fighting over $3 billion v $4 billion. I don’t want to hear about entitlements being cut. I want to hear about a reduction in government overhead.
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