Replies to post #92891 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[wbmw]

oh I understand perfectly, and that is the problem. The more hands in the pie the less pie gets to the people. Stimulus = More Government. More Moral Hazard, Big Government, take care of yo buddy fraud, and bureaucrat bleed off waste! I just believe that leaving money in the hands of workers and their employers will produce the activity that we need NOW, not more bail outs for Big Business or even States.

I don't think you understand, HGE. How do you expect the money to get disbursed? Here's a bill worth $787 billion, and it's going to 10s of thousands of ricipients. I know that if I were in charge, I couldn't possibly write all those checks myself, let alone determine for myself how the money could best be spent. In fact, I would probably work out a system in which the money gets distributed on a high level to a number of departments under my control, and each of those departments would then divvy up their share to the next level of hierarchy, and when the amount of money became manageable, the final level of hierarchy would distribute it in pieces that could be tracked, monitored, and made transparent.

And if you'll look, that's precisely what the Recovery Act did. It distributed the money to all the major governmental departments (Education, Transportation, Energy, etc.), and each of those departments distributed their share to the various state departments (California Dept of Education, New York Dept of Education, etc.). Then those state departments distributed their share to district schools, which in turn spent the money on school supplies, computers, and other means of education.

It couldn't be simpler or made more robust, secure, and responsible. All of the money has been made transparent via Recovery.org, so if you find fraud, abuse, or mismanagement, you can report it. You might want to start using your own zip code and look at where it's being spent in your own neighborhood. You don't need to be a watchdog for the entire country, but you may be interested in the effect it's having around you.

Let them learn to cut spending and balance their budgets. I heard a speech from the head of Education last week and he said, yes stimulus had saved teacher jobs but if he could get the Federal Government out of thier business he could eliminate enough jobs soley to report report report, there would be plenty left over for long term teacher pay raises.....

You may be referring to, "No Child Left Behind," a Bush policy in which standardized test scores determined teacher pay and child aptitude, except that in practice it created a lot of overhead, and the standardization of tests did not allow for many special cases in which the child was completely competent in the class, but did not test well.

By the way, just to set the record straight, the Democrats fought against this program for these exact reasons. I'm not trying to be partisan here, but it's worth pointing out that if we let the Democrats pass legislation, it just might be what's needed for this country, as history should have taught us by now.

[wall_rus]

Orange Grove: Obama's surge in government jobs
By GARY JASON
Published: Feb. 22, 2010
Updated: 4:41 p.m.

Federal workforce, compensation have grown during recession.

http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/workers-235701-federal-percent.html

President Barack Obama has been crowing that his colossal stimulus spending binge has saved us from depression and led to a miraculous economic boom, with millions of jobs "saved or created." The nation is spending its way to a Keynesian paradise!
Of course, with unemployment nationally at nearly 10 percent, most of the rest of the country is not quite as pleased with this "economic miracle." But some figures about the prosperous state of public employees explains this amazing disconnect between Obama and the rest of the country. It turns out that while the public sector is still hemorrhaging jobs (7 million jobs lost since the recession started), government workers are flourishing like never before.

The Obama boom is essentially a government employee boom.

Consider the federal government, now completely controlled by the Obama administration. This year, we will have officially the largest federal workforce in the country's history. It will reach 2.15 million – and that doesn't count nearly 650,000 postal workers, who, technically, work for a separate "corporation."

The biggest flock of new federal employees is civilian. From 1981-2008, the last year of the Bush presidency, the number of civilian workers bounced between 1.1 and 1.2 million. But Obama's first year saw a surge to nearly 1.3 million civilian workers. And this year we have added yet another 153,000 new employees, reaching an historical total of 1.43 million. Obama promises that the total will drop next year – but who but the non compos mentus now believe what he promises?

Obama's administration is not only exploding the number of civilian employees, it is jacking up federal worker compensation to obscene levels. From the onset of this recession, in December 2007, to June of last year, the federal payroll metastasized by 10 percent. Moreover, Obama is promising them a 1.4 percent raise across the board. He is giving this largess while wages in the private sector continue to stagnate.

In fact, the average federal salary is $71,000, more than 75 percent higher than the average salary in the private sector. Federal workers also get vastly more lavish bonuses, overtime compensation and benefits packages than most private-sector workers.

More amazing still, during this recession, the percentage of federal workers earning $100,000 or more a year has exploded from 14 percent to 19 percent. Nearly one in five federal workers now earn six-figure salaries, and please note that figure doesn't include bonuses and overtime!

Let's look at just two departments. Between December 2007 (the onset of the recession) and June 2009, the number of civilian employees at the Defense Department earning $150,000 or more a year went up by 500 percent, from less than 2,000 to more than 10,000. In the Transportation Department, the number of employees pulling in $170,000 a year or more went from one to nearly 1,700.

What is the driving force behind this federal employee bonanza? Public employee unions. Recent statistics regarding public employee unions help shed light on the growth of the number and compensation of federal workers. As of January, private-sector union membership had dropped to 7.2 percent of workers, from its all-time high of 36 percent, in 1953. But Union membership is growing among government workers, hitting a high of 37.4 percent.

In fact, 2009 marked a milestone: For the first time in this nation's history, a majority of all unionized workers – 51.4 percent – are government employees.

And there's the rub. We now have a vicious cycle: Unions shovel money at candidates, elect them, and then those officials sit across the bargaining table from unions to "negotiate" compensation packages. It is a travesty of labor relations.

The solution is simple, but difficult to achieve. We need a constitutional amendment that would ban outright federal employee unions as agents for bargaining contracts. With the growing economic crisis, that goal may just be achievable.