"In the last 18 months, the number of federal government employees making $100,000 a year or more has exploded, despite the economic downturn that has seen private-sector unemployment reach double-digit figures. Per the USA Today, the Department of Transportation alone has gone from one six-figure salary to a staggering 1,690!"
Per the New York Times, state and local governments have added 110,000 jobs while the private sector has lost nearly 7 million. And again per USA Today, benefit packages for government employees at all levels grew at triple the rate of private sector workers.
In the states most on the brink of fiscal disaster, California and New York, government employee unions are the unelected fourth branch of government. They use the money they get to bribe politicians with campaign donations so as to keep the gravy train running on time, and should any dare to suggest that multi-billion (or at the federal level, multi-trillion) dollar deficits are a reason to cut back and stop this fiscally destructive incestuous relationship, they instantly scream like Chicken Little that the sky is falling and if that’s not enough, start threatening to take Louisville Sluggers to kneecaps.
In my home state of Minnesota, which is closely following in their footsteps, you have the laughable display of trying to close a $2 billion plus shortfall while declaring as a prerequisite that 75% of the budget is instantly sacrosanct and untouchable. What eats up that 75%? As you might have guessed: welfare, health care, and education. Or, more accurately described: Democratic (and some Republican) politicians buying lifetime re-election by stealing from the productive to bribe the votes of the parasitic by paying their bills for them.
It matters not which area of the budget that’s larded with waste, from lavish pension plans to luxury benefit plans that dwarf the private sector: the instant the recipients sniff the the tiniest possibility that their cushy living might be reduced in the slightest, they show up at a capitol building shrieking at how evil and cruel those are who would dare to suggest a thing, and promising retribution should it happen. (And in the case of education, unions eagerly and despicably using kids as political human shields.)
In this, they sound like nothing more than hardcore drug addicts who have just been cut off from their stash and begun experiencing the first pangs