The Washington Examiner reported today that
"The economy has been in the dumps for years, but the good times keep on rolling for some favored D.C. employees.
City officials have doled out nearly $15 million in bonuses and awards since Mayor Adrian Fenty took office in January 2007, records obtained by The Examiner under the Freedom of Information Act show."
Yikes. A few years ago I worked for a dot.bomb that was on its way out. Our holiday bonus consisted of a lousy tee shirt.
This is on the heels of the USAToday report that Federal bureaucrats' salaries are now about 1.75 times as large as their private sector counterparts. That is a government average of $71,206 vs. $40,335 in the private sector.
When I graduated from college 35 years ago, and law school three years later, government service was for the altruistic and/or unmotivated. No one expected to make more money, but you did expect to have an easier and less stressful life. Outside of the military or intelligence community or in some aspects of the judiciary, there was no particular honor in government service. This has truly been turned on its head. The money for government salaries comes primarily from taxes or government operated monopolies in services like the post office or Amtrak. In large part the government is using its coercive powers to take from the productive sectors of the economy to give to the unproductive. Not only unproductive, but inefficient. No government entity that can simply raise taxes to cover its inefficiencies will ever be as efficient and productive as a private enterprise that will simply go out of business if it does not minimize its inefficiencies.
In many respects this is more insidious than any of the blatantly socialistic policies of the Obama administration. Our attitudes about merit and reward need to be radically shifted in favor back to the private sector before we see any real progress away from redistributionist public sympathies.
