Ron Smith muses about the public-private divide, in the B-More Sun:
When Mayor Dixon capitulates to Baltimore’s public safety unions, withdrawing a pension reform measure and suggesting there is a need for a “bigger fix,” we are left wondering what that could possibly be. If the public safety unions had their way in blocking this proposal, how will “more comprehensive changes” be enacted? Yet, how can they be avoided?
The gap between the public sector and private business in wages and benefits continues to grow. Last month, USA Today reported federal figures showing that public employees earned benefits worth $13.38 per hour in December 2008, compared to $7.98 for private sector workers.
A full-time government worker receives benefits worth an average of $28,830 per year. A private worker’s benefits are worth an average of $16,598. Yet in this time of recession/depression, the shrinking private sector foots the bill for massive bailouts of public employees. In the nongovernment world, jobs are being lost by the hundreds of thousands each month. Government workers are secure in theirs. As the ordinary American becomes more aware of the disparity and unfairness of the current system, anger builds.
There was a time when people took government jobs for the security they offered. The bargain was that they would sacrifice pay for that security. Over time, the bargain tilted totally in favor of the government workers as they got both job security and higher pay than their counterparts outside government. Can this system be sustained? I think not, but we shall see.
Hat tips to two people who are the recipients of public spending, either indirectly or directly: Glenn Reynolds, who pointed me to the article in the first place, and works at the University of Tennessee (which I presume gets state funds), and David Linden, who has been systematically undermining for years all of the negative emotions about the state of Maryland that I’ve harbored ever since my unfortunate experiences as a hapless child in its public-school system—and whose good research at Johns Hopkins certainly is a legitimate use of Federal monies.
But the private sector cannot carry the weight of so many largely overpaid/overbenefitted public employees. It cannot. Reynolds, on private-sector resentment: “Right now the Political Class is more interested in explaining that anger away than in doing anything about it. But I think a tipping point is in the offing.”
In the meantime, I take a wicked glee in the fact that hours have been cut back drastically among members of the California Highway Patrol . . . not on the accident/safety level, and not in terms of what it does to officers’ families, but strictly because it improves my odds of not getting caught when I give the Cruiser free rein every now and then. The poor car wants it so badly, sometimes.
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