The holiday message from the D.C. politicians to millions of
unemployed workers is that they’ll be kicked off the rolls for
jobless benefits by Christmas. As they say, have yourself a merry
little Christmas!
Holidays are tough enough for people who are struggling in
situations that don’t exactly match up with Norman Rockwell’s
picture perfect image of the idealized family sitting around the
perfect dining room table looking appreciatively at the all-time
perfect Christmas turkey (I always thought that Norman Rockwell, as
talented and nice as he was, was inadvertently responsible for more
suicides than Jim Jones. Who can live up?), without the politicians
adding to the holiday blues by letting long-term jobless benefits
lapse during what is a deep and continuing economic downturn that
is already the longest recession since the Great Depression of the
1930s.
Nationally, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting
that there are 500 unemployed workers for every 100 job openings,
the Labor Department estimates that just short of 2 million jobless
workers will lose their unemployment benefits by
Christmas.
The maddening thing in all this is that it is the
politicians of both parties who have directly created this
recession, the joblessness, and the nation’s debt and deficits with
their anti-growth, anti-business, big-spending, big-government
agenda of ever-expanding levels of taxation, litigation, mandates,
regulation, fraud and waste.
And now, instead of post-haste enacting a pro-growth,
pro-business agenda that could cut unemployment, instead of cutting
their own excessive paychecks and benefits, instead of reducing
their swollen numbers in the legislatures and downsizing the
unwarranted size of their staffs, this same political establishment
that played a key role in creating this recession and the
record-breaking levels of red ink is now telling the nation’s
long-term jobless worker to move into his mother’s basements or
take a high dive off a nearby bridge.
This isn’t the way for new members of Congress to keep the
voters they just won over to their side after Obama’s first two
years of flops and mismanagement.
The first and immediate step for the Washington
politicians of all stripes should be to clear away the anti-growth,
anti-jobs mess that they’ve created, rather than furthering
weakening the victims of their inept policies.
In other federal news, President Obama proposed a two-year
freeze on federal pay, except in the military. That might sound
good, except for the fact that the average wage of federal civilian
workers last year was $81,258, according to the U.S. Bureau of
Economic Analysis, or over $30,000 higher than the average
private-sector wage last year of $50,462.
Include benefits and pensions and the gap between average
compensation in the federal and private sectors jumps to $62,000,
i.e., $123,049 versus $61,051, respectively, in the federal and
private sectors.
Additionally, on top of government jobs being more secure
and generally less arduous, the gap between government and private
pays is increasingly growing, with the number of federal salaries
above $150,000, for instance, doubling between late 2007 and
mid-2009 while the private sector was simultaneously cutting jobs,
reducing benefits and freezing paychecks.
Obama’s proposed freeze, in short, simply preserves the
waste and inequities.
More locally here in Pittsburgh, the unionized teachers in
the suburb of Bethel Park are back at school by government decree
and no longer wearing the AFT blue T-shirts that became a standard
part of their picketing attire for the past five weeks. I didn’t
see one of those union T-shirts that included the oft-quoted
statement from Albert Shanker, President of the American Federation
of Teachers (AFT) from 1974 to 1997: “When school children start
paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the
interests of school children.”
Shanker got it wrong, completely. The kids, via their
parents, pick up the entire tab for the teachers’ salaries, the
teachers’ dues, the millions for the building where the teachers
work, plus the tab for all the heat, light and chalk in the
building.
