Hell yes. The deficit is projected to be 6.8% GDP this year. Recovery? Except FED QE is 1 Trillion dollars. Multiply all that by the fiscal multiplier and the hole is around 16-17% GDP. Can't burn the furniture forever. A Michigan Judge ruled pension contracts can be nullified under a city bankruptcy. That was positive. And that's exactly what needs to happen. Salaries and benefits are like 90% of most city and county budgets. Let them go broke.
i think salaries and pensions can get crazy. you read stories about people doing nothing jobs but getting paid big and getting 6 figure pensions too. i agree with the judge but its also not right it got this far. this is the game the governments play and only the rich benefit. you have people taking home $19,000 on a average pension so odds are they did not have a high paying job or any savings. they want to cut the 19k pension to 3k. the 6 walmart heirs together have more than the bottom 40% of americans combined. also the american people paid the bill for the banks when they did wrong and now some of those people are losing their pension while wall street made money on all this again.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/26/us/politics/illinois-pension-crisis.html?_r=0 Illinois’s problems resonate well beyond its borders. Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Kentucky are among the states confronting similar problems anybody want to bet that the banks will NOT be crammed with municipal paper from all those states upon orders from Washington thereby creating a banking crisis on top of state financial crises?
I really don't care what happens to Government workers. They're lazy bureaucrats; just another mouth to feed. Push comes to shove I'll vote with my feet and take my dollars with me. All that said, this will end badly save some technological miracle by Elon Musk.
I was in the military for 20 years, generally worked 80 hour weeks with no days off on deployment and at least 50 hour weeks when at home station, and received a fair salary on the low end of a comparable private sector salary for that job. I now make several times that just 3 years out and work half as much, so you could argue that the government was getting several times the salary I was worth from me. I observed the same in the vast majority of my coworkers, civil service and military, both in the military and in a civilian government agency where I was detailed. In fact since I've sat on both sides, I at least anecdotally can say that in my experience government workers are no more or less lazy than a large corporation private sector worker of the same level doing the same type of work. Unlike most corporate employees, however, they are held to an insane level of scrutiny on the spending of every cent, which ironically often leads to suboptimal outcomes and to people like me leaving the government because life's to short to deal with being treated like a lazy bureaucrat when you're working your tail off. A quick story to illustrate this, just before retiring I was asked to provide a full audit trail three times over the course of a year on the same travel claim. It had been audited by three different entities, all mandated by law, which by definitions bureaucrats can only enforce, not make). I estimate that more money was spent auditing that claim than the total paid out. An achilles28 would mark that down to worthless lazy bureaucrats, I marked it down to lawmakers who share achilles28's view of all government employees as lazy bureaucrats who passed irrational laws that those bureaucrats had to implement because it was their job! That's a concrete data point, although admittedly somewhat anecdotal. I often wonder how many actual human "lazy bureaucrats" the achilles28s of the world know personally, or if they're just parroting what they hear in their echo chamber?
First, thank you for your service. You're a real patriot. To answer your question, I know several people who work for Government (municipal, provincial) and they all describe their jobs as cushy - overpaid and underworked. Many are teachers; a gigantic blight. One, a good friend, works for the local municipality in zoning. Another with Provincial Healthcare Exec Admin. Another as a Doctor. And two cops (both vastly overpaid, but worked hard). Two of my close friends who work in Government (Teacher and civil servant) have commented to me personally that they can't believe they actually get paid so much for what they do. They even said it feels criminal, then laughed. One of my buddies says he spends more then 3 hours a day surfing the web and doing email. Some days are complete write offs. This is where the money goes. Pensions and salaries for teachers are obscene, considering they take over 3 months off the calendar year in summer vacation, PA days etc. An executive in the private sector may get 4 weeks off a year MAX after a couple decades of service. In Canada, public sector pensions are largely financed by the taxpayer. Not the bureaucrat. Pensions are extreme. Like >7 figures for a regular EMS worker after 25 years. Who pays for that? Me. Guys in the private sector who have to pay THEIR OWN pension, and then kick-in and pay for the pension of all the fucking overpaid bureaucrats who don't even pay their own way!!!! All this via higher taxes. It's indisputable Government bureaucracies are hopelessly inefficient, underworked and overpaid because theres no market discipline to exercise fiscal restraint, and public unions and politicians exchange votes for concessions when contracts are renegotiated. FDR was vehemently against public sector unionization for this reason. It sounds like you work in an aberrant municipality. That definitely isn't the norm. But as the County continues to go bankrupt and the tax base crumbles, more and more civil servants will get squeezed. Which is good. The size of Government is absolutely ridiculous. It's way, way, way too huge. Government spending is something like >25% GDP. Cut it down to 10. Cut the whole fucking thing.