Governing for Government
Democrats’ real constituency are government workers and contractors, not citizens
By Sam Stone
Taxes are supposed to scale with the economy. As the economy and population grow, tax revenues grow with them. Moreover, as population and revenue grow, government should be able to achieve the same kind of efficiencies of scale that corporations consistently strive for and achieve. Hence, over time, we should be able to do more with less. That isn’t happening. Instead, the bigger our population and economy becomes, the less efficient our government has gotten. The Hoover Dam was finished on time and under budget. Recent government public works projects are lucky to only triple their initial estimates and timeline for completion – if, that is, they’re every actually completed. Many, like California’s promised bullet train, manage to spend hundreds of millions, even billions, and deliver…nothing.
What happened? There was a time when both Parties worked for the American people. That simply isn’t the case anymore, and hasn’t been for decades. National Republicans spent those decades doing the bidding of big business, Democrats spent them doing the bidding of big government. Both gave lip-service, at times, to workers. Neither meant what they said.
When John F. Kennedy opened the door to unionization of government workers, he unleashed a gathering storm on America. That storm has become a hurricane. In Blue states and cities, government employee unions essentially run the show. They fund and organize behind chosen candidates and use their vast muscle to crush opposition. Once those politicians are in office, they find themselves negotiating pay, benefits, and programmatic expansions with the people who got them elected. Unsurprisingly, the result is that government workers have gotten pretty much everything they’ve asked for. The general public, meanwhile, has gotten hosed.
Leaving aside active-duty military members, there are now approximately eight million workers in the United States directly employed by, contracted to, or funded by the federal government. That’s more people than the population of half the countries on earth. Another twenty million work for state and local governments. Eleven-some million more work in public education. Add it all up, and there are something on the order of thirty-nine or forty million U.S. workers – not including state and local government contractors and grant recipients - on government payrolls. That’s out of about 131 million workers, total - or about 30% of the U.S. workforce. And those numbers don’t include private sector workers – like those in horizontal construction industries, medical research, etc. – whose primary source of income is government contracting. It’s entirely possible that almost half of our working population derives their income from government in one way or another.
That’s a hell of a voting bloc.
Those are the people Democrats work for. Unlike Americans working in the private sector, the recipients of government paychecks never suffer a recession. They get annual raises. Their pay is adjusted for inflation. They never have to fear cutbacks. They’re always hiring. Failure isn’t a fire-able offense, it’s justification for more spending. And as long as they keep electing the people they’re going to be negotiating their next contract with, there’s no risk of any of that ever changing. As for Republicans, at the behest of business, we’ve done a nice job pushing back on unnecessary private-sector regulation and commercial taxation. But that’s it. We failed, completely, at fighting back against government bloat, or the country wouldn’t be in the position it is.
What’s the answer? Government needs to be bled one position at a time and elected Republicans need to feel the heat from their constituents to make it happen. Instead of asking what they can do for us, we need to be asking them how many positions they eliminated for us. Indeed, that is the single most valuable metric we can judge officeholders by – how many fewer people are employed by our federal, state, and local governments today than there were yesterday. Ninety percent of the work in government gets done by thirty percent of the people already, keep the right third of the workforce in place and no one will notice the difference.
Sam Stone is the co-host of Breaking Battlegrounds
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