Wednesday, April 06, 2011 5:09 PM

Too Many Bureaucrats and They Are Paid Too Much

Please consider the following YouTube video by Daniel J. Mitchell, Ph.D. Senior Fellow, The Cato Institute.

Video: There Are too Many Bureaucrats and They Are Paid too Much http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xzd3puY ... r_embedded

I met Dan Mitchell last week at the Kauffman Foundation. Every year, Kauffman holds a conference for economic bloggers. It's a lot of fun and I have participated 3 consecutive years.

I am a big fan of the Cato Institute. http://www.cato.org/ They stand for Individual Liberty, Free Markets, and Peace. Those are three admirable goals.

I just added them to my left sidebar under the heading "Taxpayer Friendly Sites". Inquiring minds may wish to bookmark their site.

Addendum:

Proving that some people can neither read nor think, I received an email from an apparent government sympathizer showing a graph by Calculated Risk on Government Employment Since 1976. http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/ ... -1976.html

Interestingly, the Cato video posted a similar chart then went on to dispute it three ways, primarily by salary, second by mentioning quasi-government employees, and third by pointing out figures do not include military employees, postal workers, subsidy recipients, or contract jobs.

Here is a chart from the video.



Those numbers are from 2005. Care to guess where those numbers are now?

Quasi-Public Jobs

Bear in mind the numbers also do not include "Quasi-Public" jobs.

Please consider Current Decade of Job Losses vs. Great Depression; How Did Quasi-Public Jobs Fare? Who is Whining? http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot. ... great.html

Public and Quasi-Public Jobs vs. Everything Else



Please see Mandel's article for a state-by-state breakdown.

Who is Doing all the Whining?

Who is doing all the whining and all the pissing and moaning? The answer of course is those who fared the best in the last decade: the police and fire unions, the teachers' unions, transit unions, and public unions in general.

Many in private sector fields have been hammered silly with rapidly rising healthcare costs and lower paychecks (assuming they have a job at all). Meanwhile those with the most benefits and those who have suffered the least are the ones unjustifiably bitching to high heavens about how unfairly they are being treated.

The above chart is from A Decade of Labor Market Pain by Mike Mandel. http://innovationandgrowth.wordpress.co ... rket-pain/

Amusingly the person who wrote me said I need to "get a grip". No Kurt, you need to listen to what the video said, then think.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot. ... -paid.html