Air traffic control cuts part of our government’s war on work?

by philg

Federal, state, and local governments have been waging something of a “war on work” in the U.S. over the last 50 years or so. Payroll taxes, paid only by workers, have skyrocketed. Regulations and paperwork related to all kinds of jobs has been dramatically increased. In cities such as Cambridge, workers are made to feel like chumps in mixed-income developments because the apartment next door is often occupied by a family none of whose members have ever worked and who yet enjoy more or less the same material lifestyle as the worker (but perhaps a much better overall lifestyle because the non-workers usually have the joy of parenthood whereas the worker often does not).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Freedom_Day calculates some of this, showing that a worker must now spend from January 1 through April 17 to pay taxes. In theory that means the worker is enjoying the fruits of his or her labor from mid-April through December. In practice I think it would make more sense to look at the marginal return to work. On what day of the year does the worker actually pull ahead of the typical non-worker (who may collect some combination of welfare, disability, food stamps, free health care, subsidized housing, etc.)? In Cambridge I think it might not be until October or November. So the worker does end up with some disposable income to spend on travel, etc., but the effective hourly wage compared to not working is quite low (2000+ hours of work for perhaps 125 hours of pay (after taxes) that is above what a neighboring family collects in government benefits).

On casual inspection it doesn’t seem to make sense that a tiny restriction in the growth of federal government spending (the “cuts” referred to by newspapers are actually a reduction in spending growth; in every case the government will spend more than in the previous year) would result in the government melting down one of the rare things that almost everyone agrees it does reasonably well (albeit spending rather lavishly). However, it might make sense if the air traffic control cuts and subsequent delays for business travel are just the latest battle in the government’s campaign against work. An insufficient number of workers were discouraged by seeing their stay-at-home neighbors enjoy their continuous streams of government checks and free services. A remarkable number of people have irrationally decided to persist in working. Many of those folks will have to travel on business, which often means air travel. So what can the government do to make work an even more miserable experience? Cut air traffic controllers in the busiest airspace and impose 1-2 hour delays on a lot of people who were hoping to make it to a meeting. So business travelers will be getting up at 4:30 am instead of 6 am and endure being squeezed into a coach seat for 3 hours instead of 1.

6 thoughts on “Air traffic control cuts part of our government’s war on work?”

  2. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was on welfare, Phil. Slightly off topic, but it looks like his time spent not earning income wasn’t wasted on video games and cable TV viewing.
    It’s ironic this young man hated America yet lived fairly well off of same.

  3. There really is not enough work to go around. Productivity constantly grows. Telephone operators were made obsolete by dial phones. Typesetters at newspapers are obsolete. Data entry clerks — obsolete. Grocery checkout clerks made more productive by scanners and self-checkout stations. Most work that can be offshored IS offshored.

    Is this a government war on work? Alongside the government war on Christianity (posting the Ten Commandments not allowed), the government war on decency (allowing gay marriage), the government war on men (allowing women to vote and own property), the government war on whatever Obamacare is a war on?

    Not to mention the government war on pay for work. You don’t have to pay to watch a movie or listen to a song; you can wait until it’s posted on YouTube. You don’t have to pay to get any computer program; you can find an open source equivalent for free. You don’t have to pay to get people to write for you; just allow them to post comments on your blog and you get it all for nothing.

  4. I’m a little confused as to the “reduction in growth” meme. Nothing that I’ve seen supports this assertion. For example, I looked at the FAA budget 2013 estimate (picked because it has a well-defined role, scales roughly with population, and of course is relevant to readers here.) and the FAA’s budget appeared to decrease between fiscal years 2012 and 2013. Headline number went from 15,901,682 to 15,172,000. (In thousands of dollars.) Actual 2011 expenditure was 15,929,352.

    I am not any sort of accountant and have no experience at all with government financial statements, so I could be misreading something, but it’s been very frustrating for me hearing that these cuts are just reductions in growth, without ever seeing a pointer to a primary source.

  5. Chris: I don’t think the observation that federal spending will be higher going forward, regardless of any “cuts” that we are told about, is inconsistent with a particular agency spending slightly less in 2013 than it spent in 2012, particularly given that some agencies are still digesting “stimulus” money that was supposed to be temporary.

    http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/43907-BudgetOutlook.pdf has a table 1-1 that shows spending growing every year. The document talks about “if current laws remain in place,” which I read to mean that the sequester takes effect. Separate parts of the document give adjustments for how much more the federal government would spend, and therefore how much larger the deficit would be (and therefore how much more we would borrow from our children), if the sequester were revoked.

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/richardsalsman/2013/03/15/why-the-fiscal-sequester-scheme-is-actually-bullish/ is a little easier to read.

    http://blog.heritage.org/2013/03/01/sequestration-much-larger-spending-cuts-needed-to-balance-the-budget/ charts some of the numbers.

    More simply, if you believe that federal spending is going down, you could start using a credit card to buy luxuries for your family because surely your federal payroll and income taxes will be getting cut soon too. The shrinking federal government won’t need such a high percentage of what had been your paycheck.

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