Forbes magazine has jumped on the public employee fringe benefits story that Kentucky's media hasn't quite grasped yet:
"The common presumption is that public servants forgo high wages in exchange for safe jobs and benefits. The reality is they get all three. State and local government workers get paid an average of $25.30 an hour, which is 33% higher than the private sector's $19, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Throw in pensions and other benefits and the gap widens to 42%."
"Four in five public-sector workers have lifetime pensions, versus only one in five in the private sector. The difference shifts huge risks from government to private-sector workers."
It's an eye-opening article. Here's hoping it opens some Kentucky eyes.
1 comment:
Forbes evidently wishes to forget that over the past eight years of Bush Republican conservative domination, the greatest transfer of wealth occurred by private sector outsourcing higher paying jobs to lower paying foreign countries.
In addition, wages fell by over a $1.00 an hour in the US.
Together, these caused the greatest redistribution of wealth in our nation's history, from the working and middle class to the top 1% that now controls 20% of the nation's wealth--just like it was in Hoover's Depression.
Public sector workers were better able resist this Republican raid on their personal finances.
Still, the Bush administration did its best to transfer more public sector jobs to the private sector who demonstrated their inability to do the caliber of work that public sector employees could do.
The Bush administration paid Blackwater a $100,000 a year for their troops in Iraq, while only paying American GIs about $30,000 a year.
The Bush administration loathed and detested American troops all the while pretending to support them--so long as Big Oil was able to get control of Iraqi oil.
The consequence of this Republican redistribution of wealth from the many to the few has also been a major contributor to the current financial mess the Republicans got us into.
It clearly demonstrates that Republicans can't manage money and don't know how to run a government. They do not deserve to hold public office, as they are treacherous with the public's money.
Republicans don't like American values and don't want to understand them. Republicans fail to understand the importance of money circulating. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist Paper 30:
"Money is, with propriety, considered as the vital principle of the body politic; as that which sustains its life and motion, and enables it to perform its most essential functions. A complete power, therefore, to procure a regular and adequate supply of it, as far as the resources of the community will permit, may be regarded as an indispensable ingredient in every constitution. From a deficiency in this particular, one of two evils must ensue; either the people must be subjected to continual plunder, as a substitute for a more eligible mode of supplying the public wants, or the government must sink into a fatal atrophy, and, in a short course of time, perish."
The Bush administration was for eight years an atrophied government. Good riddance!
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