I was teaching a helicopter instrument flying lesson today and the student commented that the air traffic controller on Boston Approach sounded like he had a cold. I said “I’m not sure how he could have caught anything. His office is way up in Merrimack, New Hampshire and at an average salary of $117,000 per year (plus benefits) he should be able to live in a house that is at least a few hundred feet away from any neighbor.”
We got to talking about the morality of government paying its workers so much more than the private sector would and giving those workers pay raises during the depth of a recession, raises that would be paid for, in part, with taxes on people earning $25,000 per year.
I had an epiphany then. Some people complain about the government redistributing wealth from rich to poor. But as government employment grows to become an ever larger percentage of the American workforce, the very existence of government is redistributing wealth in the opposite direction. For example, government workers in California get paid, including pension liability, more than double what private sector workers earn (more). As the California government gets bigger and/or its pool of retirees (many can retire at age 50) grows, the government inherently is a mechanism for stealing from the poor (Walmart workers, landscapers, restaurant workers, operators of small businesses) and giving to the rich (schoolteachers, policemen, firefighters, bureaucrats at all levels).
The government needs to take some money from the rich and give it to the poor because the government’s habit of paying “public servants” 2-4X what it needs to is one of the principal causes of impoverishment.
[Anticipating some comments of the form “the poor don’t pay much income tax”, let me point out that poorer Americans pay a large proportion of their income in sales tax, property tax, excise taxes, and various fees. Both a poor person and a rich person pay the same $13.70 toll to travel on the Massachusetts Turnpike and ensure that its average toll taker can earn $71,000 per year (plus benefits and pension), but the $13.70 is more sorely missed by the poor person than by the rich person.]
for such a comprehensively smart guy, Phil, isn’t it a bit late to be having that epiphany?
There are already long-standing villains in the ‘redistribution up’ model … unnecessary-but-state-sponsored businesses like arms and mandatory insurance. Just because Conservatives scream bloody murder about the inefficiencies of ‘big government’, and are totally mum on the inefficiencies of ‘big business’ — while Leftists make the converse argument — doesn’t mean these two camps aren’t on the same side of the coin…
In Florida they are replacing toll takers with “Sun Passes”. Some toll-takers remain, but I can’t imagine they make anything like that salary.
Also the government rezoned land that was productive agricultural land outside of Miami and allowed developers to turn it into houses that now sit vacant. So the local governments were complicit in this whole disaster.
On the local news they were listing the firefighters in Miami-Dade that make over 1/4 million per year. In salary. I think some of these salaries are excessive.
The entrepreneurial spirit made (and makes) this country exceptional.
But maybe it is spreading somewhere else? Or is it in hiding here?
“the inefficiencies of ‘big business’” are the problem of those businesses and their shareholders only, since consumers can choose to use more efficient competitors. The inefficiencies of government are a problem for all, since the government simply finances these inefficiencies by taking more money by force, and in many cases the users of government services have no choice due to actual monopoly, or the inability of the private sector to compete against government which has no constraints on its spending (see the BBC, whose websites cheerfully wipe out commercial competitors due to the licence fee money largesse it wallows in: it recently bought Lonely Planet, for no discernable public service reason, other than that it had the money to do it.)