Re: Unemployment rate hits 9.8%. Hope and Change?
Oh, I agree with you that pay for civil service employees is rather absord these days, but considering that we heard corporate CEOs telling us that they needed their big multi-million dollar bonuses in the wake of TARP in order to "recruit and/or retain the smartest accountants around", I think I can deal with government employees under federal contract receiving pay that's comporable to their private sector counterparts. When you stop long enough to think about it, most federal employees outside of Congress haven't been around the government long enough to be considered "career civil servants". Contrary to what most people think, there are fewer real careerist within the federal employee ranks than people might think. But do you know why that is? The answer is very simple...
Conservatives have been screaming "BIG GOVERNMENT" for so long and that goverment is inefficient that federal agencies started reducing their ranks from within and have contracted from the private sector. But in order to "recruit" the best and the brightest, the pay had to be increased to compete w/the private sector.
So, don't complain about "big government" and "big government pay" if you're going to continue complaining about the inefficiency of government and that the private sector can do it better. For if you do it often enough and loud enough, your government will hear you and start doing the one thing it can do in order to meet your demands - contract out the workload!
You can't have it both ways!!!
If one wants to cherry pick and compare top CEO's with top government, there will never be a comparison. Its also a strawman. The article that I linked, and many others, show that the average government employee makes far more now, and with better benefits, than the average private sector. But what makes it worse, again as I pointed out, is that the government sector has seen no contraction during this downturn, in fact becoming an even larger burden on the taxpayer, as revenue bases contracted. To add further insult, much of Stimulus went to maintain big government and unions, both government and non-government.
I would rate the government not much better controlling these bonuses, in firms where government money was willingly taken (not to be confused with where it was forced, which was another Obama miscue) was a further mistake by Obama. When you look at how Geithner gave that money out, there was way too much back scratching anyway.
Back more to the thread and the failure of Obama's policies. Passing Obamacare, threatening Cap and Trade, blowing $800 trillion in Stimulus, all of this could not be more wrong in an ailing economy. We got the proof now.
I am one conservative who sided more with McCain back in 2002, when he suggested Bush trim back the tax cuts with the War costs on the horizon. It would have been the right move, although in the end, the tax cuts are not what did us in, it was the housing bubble debacle. But back to Bush, I believe he was too inflexible at that time. Unfortunately, now with the mess we are in, raising taxes on anyone now, even if the original tax cuts were not as McCain recommended, is a bad idea. Likewise, Obama stuck with his massive spending agenda (Obamacare and threatened Cap and trade) at a time when the economy could not absorb it. And Stimulus is such a massive pile of crap.
American business does not trust Obama worth a lick right now. He has taken normal business risk coming out of a recession and made it far worse than it need be. We would be far better off right now if there had been no Stimulus and no Obamacare. The only thing I agreed with was TARP, but unspent and paid-back monies needed to go back to debt reduction.
Obama took bad Keynesian economics and made it worse.
You mean to tell us that the unemployment rate could have peaked at a whole percentage point more than it did?????!!!!!! Good God! I had no idea the financial crisis was of that sort of magnitude!