Today whenever you debate a public employee you will hear them justify their annual raises as if to deny them that would subject them to abject poverty. This is bunk.
First of all, what increase in the cost of living are they referring to?
Are housing prices higher today than they were a year ago? How about rents? How about automobiles? How about gas? How about food? how about computers? How about cell phones?
Are interest rates higher today than a year ago? In fact, they are at never before seen lows rivaling Japans rates during their so-called “lost decade”.
There is no increase in the cost of living that justifies these perpetual increases in public sector labor costs.
Indeed, we are in a deflationary spiral caused by too much debt; in the public sector and the private sector and this is driving down costs and profits.
According to one economic expert, America needs to shed nearly twenty TRILLION $$$ of public AND private debt, before our debt to GDP ratio will look healthy enough to suggest a long term recovery in the economy is possible or sustainable. And a new ratio in this metric is what is needed to attract the new investments into our financial markets and that is the only thing that will lead to real and sustainable long term economic growth.
Our friends in government should stop being apologists for this runaway government spending masquerading as a modest annual “cost of living” increase for a few downtrodden public employees.
As has been pointed out recently by Dr. Lanny Ebenstein, public employees make more than their counterparts in the private sector, they know it, we know it, everyone knows it.
And by the way, the CPI, which is the source pointed to when defending the need for these annual pay raises, is a notoriously inaccurate model for measuring the cost of goods and services in a diverse global economy as well as in a diverse regional economy. Like most government agencies, the Labor Department, which produces the annual CPI, is just another bungling federal government agency that should be privatized or eliminated and the savings returned to the taxpayers by way of a cut in the payroll tax.
Now that would be change I could believe in.