A Modest Proposal Regarding Government Employees

In America, government employment has long been described as "public service", and looked on as a calling, lending it a cachet that jobs in the Private Sector generally don't enjoy. OffHisMeds can't fault this common misperception. That's what we were all taught in school as impressionable young kids, and back in the days when government jobs actually paid less than the Private Sector, there might have been a skosh of truth to it. Now, of course, it's mostly a crock. I've learned through long and arduous observation that all work is good and virtuous, and Private Sector work is arguably more so because - unlike our Public Sector counterparts - we actually a) compete for our jobs every day of our lives with the rest of the world, b) are mostly unprotected by the government and unions, c) universally provide services that people would actually buy, not the ones that are forced on them, d) get nothing in the way of guaranteed health care and pensions and, e) are held to standards of performance and improvement to ensure ever increasing productivity, as government employees most assuredly are not.

Largely because of what I will generously call "Public Sector Overemployment", federal, state, county and municipal governments in their various permutations now consume over 40% of GDP whilst creating only 20% (30 million) of the jobs, including direct employees and contractors. That's not only three times as much of a bite out of GDP as in the time of Obama's hero FDR, it also comes to a cost of $185,000 per job, and it's killing the economy. Here's a few things to think about:

- Government employees earn far more than their Private Sector counterparts in comparable jobs. Of the many outrages about government employment, this is the most under-reported.

- For all the squawking about CEO bonuses, Public Sector bonuses for non-executive jobs far exceed that paid in the Private Sector. That's right: regular incentive pay for even the most menial positions, and no discernable performance standards to acheiving it, other than showing up.

- Government employees work a lot less days and a lot less hours than the rest of us. Consider that - in this age of seven a.m. to five p.m. workdays, unpaid overtime and workweeks that run Sunday to Saturday - government employees have been working nine to five (not including mandatory breaks), and enjoy all of the national holidays to celebrate a collection of inanimate objects that most of their Private Sector counterparts do not. The term "sabbatical" - or paid long term vacations - is nowhere found in the Private Sector, but found everywhere in government employment.

- All government employees retire on sumptuous medical plans and cushy pensions guaranteed by the rest of us and paid out at a rate that NGEs (Non Governmental Employees) could only dream of: generally 50-75% of total compensation for the last five years of employment. The vast majority of the Private Sector gets nothing.

- The vast majority of Public Sector employees don't put a dime into Social Security, which as you know is a 15% siphon off the top of every Private Sector paycheck in America. So while you're struggling to save anything in a 401k, your fellow citizens in government have it made.

- One last little irony in this CEO-bashing era: government employees account for the majority of all passengers living it large flying on heretofore unacceptable "private jets", and government ownership of private jets exceeds that of the Private Sector.

On top of all of the above, what really puts the nation in a bind is that government employees - for all that they spent their lives rendering services that rational consumers would for the most part never have willingly paid for - virtually all retire 10-15 years before the rest of us stiffs. Twenty-and-out or Twenty five-and-out are the accepted norms for virtually all government employment in order to qualify for the maximum pension. Get a government job when you're 22, and call it a day when you're 47, assuming you're one of the unlucky ones that has to hang in there for 25 years.

Our current financial woes aren't just caused by Evil Bankers making imprudent mortgage loans at the behest of Barney Frank. No, a good deal of the economy's downturn is directly as a result of tens of millions of able bodied people living it large while the rest of us pick up the tab. All of the Giant Brains in Washington have lost sight of a simple elemental truth as they twiddle the knobs on the Starship "Economic Enterprise", trying to find just the right mixture of interest rates, monetary policy, government spending, "stimulus", earmarks, milking your 401k and prostrating themselves before the Chinese as they beg for another loan that will put things right: At the end of the day, money is a Medium Of Exchange. It represents nothing more than turning labor and materials into the things people want, which results in Fulfillment. Pay 50 million people for doing very little - or even nothing at all - and you not only aren't producing Fulfillment, you're killing the entire system.

That is why our Public Sector brothers and sisters are ideally positioned to not only bail out the economy, but do the right thing, and be the Public Servants they were destined to be. For starters, my suggestion is that all retirees go back to work until they're 65 or 70, just like the rest of us. After all, it was their unsustainable salaries, pensions and packages of goodies that is largely responsible for the economic downturn in the first place.

Here's how it would work: Let's assume your average retiree ended their career making $50K per year (including bennies). Put just ten million of those able-bodied folks back to work for nothing more than their pension, and the economy would get a $500 Billion dollar shot in the arm every year. And I would take it a step further and not return them to their previously unproductive lives as Congressional Aides, IRS agents, Grief Counselors, Department of Motor Vehicle doorstops or Fireman past their calendar-posing prime; no, this go-round, they would be required to work in the Private Sector producing a product or service that people actually would buy.

Think of it! Ten million healthy, well-educated souls unleashing their productive fury on the Chinese. And did I mention well-rested? As we discussed above, in their careers, government employees haven't really been tasked to do much, insulated as they were from the real world of producing a product or service on time, and against competition. That leisurely pace you see behind the counter of any and every government office is no illusion. That really is as fast as they move.

So they ought to have a lot of gas left in the tank, so to speak.

Next, we could take a significant percentage of active government employees and get them to actually do something productive as well. Since the Federal government has over 15 million employees and contractors and state/municipal governments employ another 20 million, that's 35 million souls with some spare time on their hands. Here's where we deploy OffHisMeds' "Half and Half" rule of government employment:

"At any given point in time during the workday, only one half of all government employees are actually working; of these, only one half are actually doing anything that needs to be done".

Therefore, we should be able to capture an additional 17.5 million man-years of work every year simply by redeploying government employees to more productive pursuits when they're not doing their regular jobs, which - as we have proven - is roughly half the time. At $50K per employee (including bennies), that's another $875 billion shot in the arm to the economy, each and every year! That's as much as Obama's stimulus package, only it won't cost taxpayers a dime!

Just think of how many roads, bridges, sewer systems, superhighways, wind farms, power plants and Carbon Sequestration demonstration projects we could build with that kind of manpower, with plenty left over to churn out all of the appliances, electronics, clothing, toys, overpriced sneakers and everything else that normally comes out of China. Our balance of trade would reverse itself overnight. Tax revenues would skyrocket.

America would be ascendant once again.

And one footnote: if the debate about overpaid and underworked government workers does nothing, it should at least stop the jaw flapping from the Obama administration about the "failures" of the Private Sector and the "unsustainable" solution that GM has proposed for its bailout, inasmuch as the only reason it is unsustainable is the retirement benefits forced on our auto makers over the past 50 years, courtesy of the UAW and a U.S. department of Labor dominated by the Democrat Party.

What's sauce for the goose.....