A friend of mine, himself a self-employed small businessman, recently shared a discussion he had with a local civil servant who happens to be a mutual acquaintance of ours; turns out, this person has been doing very well since the economic downturn, working in a job that, in addition to a generous benefits package, is paying him a six-figure salary in a local economy…central Florida…that is not famous for reflecting high standards of living. It’s a good job, a tiny bit prestigious, but nothing that is requiring of an advanced degree or anything like that. The additional background on this is that my friend, like me, is also a small businessperson, and he’s been through a foreclosure and a lot of other associated difficulties since the local economy fell on such hard times. My friend’s reaction to the conversation he had with our mutual acquaintance? Simply and bitterly, he said, “I should have been working for the city all these years.”
In many areas throughout the country, things are upside down; it is the public employees who are enjoying both superior benefits and now superior wages, while those in the private sector are not only now seeing less compensation, but are suffering the additional humility of having what they do bring home sizably taxed to continue to allow those at the government trough to continue feeding at what has become a seemingly-endless buffet. Government pensions, per se, do not disturb me, but the intractable stances of those who feel that the status of those pensions should remain entirely unaffected by the economic circumstances that have besieged the rest of us, as though they should be allowed to exist in their own bubble, is offensive.
If we live in a country where the government allows corporations the unfettered ability to ship American jobs elsewhere, then all Americans, in one way or another, should have to share in the misery that results from that; if public sector compensation is scaled to what is going on in the private sector…which should always be the case, seeing how it is the private sector, ultimately, that provides for a public sector to exist…then we will come much closer to the economic fairness that so many on the left allegedly seek when they so vocally go to bat for the rank-and-file of government unions.
I don’t care for the “Us vs. Them” mentality that has permeated much of this discussion, and in many cases it is literally pitting neighbor against neighbor. However, the fault of that rests with too many public sector employees and their union pals who, in the face of a disintegrating national economy, choose to stick their fingers in their ears and scream “La-la-la-la…!” at the tops of their lungs when anyone tries to get across to them the reality that the rest of us are not privileged to live in a false economy that allows those who do to look at the world from atop a mountain of taxpayer-funded guarantees.
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Bob Yetman, Editor-at-Large at Christian Money.com (www.christianmoney.com), is an author of a variety of materials on personal finance and investing, as well as on topics of fitness and self defense, to include the book Investor's Passport to Hedge Fund Profits (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) and the unarmed combat training DVD Thunderstrikes - How to Develop One Shot, One Kill Striking Power (Paladin Press).
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