Are Public Employees "Underworked"?
This commentary says public employees are underworked:
The authors provide a whole set of data that shows that the average public employee, as an individual, works less on a weekly basis than employees in the private sector. But you knew that, didn't you? The very idea that the bloated rolls of public employees should be restored is absurd. Do we really need studies to show us that?
Listen, I now perfectly decent folks who are public employees. I've got nothing against them, and I certainly don't want to see them lose their jobs. On the other hand, I know perfectly decent folks who've lost their jobs in the private sector and can't find another job so far. We're in tough times and this is what happens in tough times. If you've been through this yourself, you know what it's like.
The fact is, we won't have a healthy economy as long as we tax people to pay other people to do things that don't really need doing, or who don't have to work very hard to do them. We ignored all this when the economy was growing and taxes flowed into federal, state and local governments. That's not the case anymore. Everyone's going to have to adjust.
Right?
With state and local governments struggling to balance budgets in a still sluggish economy, government employment has fallen by 562,000 jobs since September 2008, a decline of 2.6%. In response, the Obama administration has called for more federal aid—on top of the $250 billion doled out in the 2009 Recovery Act—to help keep state and local government payrolls near prerecession levels.
But supporters of more federal aid implicitly assume that the size of the public sector was optimal before the recession...More...
The authors provide a whole set of data that shows that the average public employee, as an individual, works less on a weekly basis than employees in the private sector. But you knew that, didn't you? The very idea that the bloated rolls of public employees should be restored is absurd. Do we really need studies to show us that?
Listen, I now perfectly decent folks who are public employees. I've got nothing against them, and I certainly don't want to see them lose their jobs. On the other hand, I know perfectly decent folks who've lost their jobs in the private sector and can't find another job so far. We're in tough times and this is what happens in tough times. If you've been through this yourself, you know what it's like.
The fact is, we won't have a healthy economy as long as we tax people to pay other people to do things that don't really need doing, or who don't have to work very hard to do them. We ignored all this when the economy was growing and taxes flowed into federal, state and local governments. That's not the case anymore. Everyone's going to have to adjust.
Right?
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