Public Employees as Scapegoats

Here is a bit from a piece by Robert Reich on his blog:

Public servants are convenient scapegoats. Republicans would rather deflect attention from corporate executive pay that continues to rise as corporate profits soar, even as corporations refuse to hire more workers. They don’t want stories about Wall Street bonuses, now higher than before taxpayers bailed out the Street. And they’d like to avoid a spotlight on the billions raked in by hedge-fund and private-equity managers whose income is treated as capital gains and subject to only a 15 percent tax, due to a loophole in the tax laws designed specifically for them.

It’s far more convenient to go after people who are doing the public’s work - sanitation workers, police officers, fire fighters, teachers, social workers, federal employees – to call them “faceless bureaucrats” and portray them as hooligans who are making off with your money and crippling federal and state budgets. The story fits better with the Republican’s Big Lie that our problems are due to a government that’s too big.

Above all, Republicans don’t want to have to justify continued tax cuts for the rich. As quietly as possible, they want to make them permanent.

I find this funny and sad. Funny because it is ridiculous to go after ordinary people as the "cause" of a problem. This is like firing the team rather than the coach when you have a losing season. Sure you can do that, but it isn't very bright. Certainly the team has a role in not winning, but the coach has the power to make key decisions. If you want to fix the team, fix the coach. If you want to fix the economy, fix the "movers and shakers" at the top.

I find the above sad because the reality is that the US has bought a right wing story of Reagan trickle down economics where you reward the top and everything wonderful is supposed to flow from that. The reality is something different. Here is an example of how "rewarding" the top has created a monster. Here is a bit from a news story about a government panel's report on the causes of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill:

A US panel skewered British giant BP as well as Halliburton and Transocean, saying management failures were to blame for the Gulf oil spill, and warned without reform such a disaster could happen again.
Releasing a key chapter of its final report, the panel Wednesday also took aim at US government officials, sharply criticizing them for lax oversight of both the operation in the Gulf of Mexico and the industry.
The root causes of the blowout were "systemic and, absent significant reform in both industry practices and government policies, might well recur," the report said.
Despite the "inherent risks" of deepwater drilling, "the accident of April 20 was avoidable," it said, listing nine key decisions which were made to save time or money even though a safer alternative was available.

Management in the US has gone from making 40-50 times what a typical worker owned to making 500-600 times what a worker earns. Lavishing fortunes on management has led to disasters like the oil spill.

The problem isn't at the bottom. It is at the top. Attacking public employees is wrong-headed. The real crooks who stole over $2 trillion from the US economy was the financial industry in the US. It pays itself half billion dollar "bonuses" while destroying the economy. They've looted the public treasury to make the Wall Street banks "whole" but have left a multi-trillion dollar deficit, unemployment near 10%, and a plague of mortgage foreclosures across the land. For this you blame public employees?

Reich kiboshes the right wing's claims:

But the right’s argument is shot-through with bad data, twisted evidence, and unsupported assertions.

They say public employees earn far more than private-sector workers. That’s untrue when you take account of level of education. Matched by education, public sector workers actually earn less than their private-sector counterparts.

The Republican trick is to compare apples with oranges — the average wage of public employees with the average wage of all private-sector employees. But only 23 percent of private-sector employees have college degrees; 48 percent of government workers do. Teachers, social workers, public lawyers who bring companies to justice, government accountants who try to make sure money is spent as it should be - all need at least four years of college.

Compare apples to apples and and you’d see that over the last fifteen years the pay of public sector workers has dropped relative to private-sector employees with the same level of education. Public sector workers now earn 11 percent less than comparable workers in the private sector, and local workers 12 percent less. (Even if you include health and retirement benefits, government employees still earn less than their private-sector counterparts with similar educations.)

Here’s another whopper. Republicans say public-sector pensions are crippling the nation. They say politicians have given in to the demands of public unions who want only to fatten their members’ retirement benefits without the public noticing. They charge that public-employee pensions obligations are out of control.

Some reforms do need to be made. Loopholes that allow public sector workers to “spike” their final salaries in order to get higher annuities must be closed. And no retired public employee should be allowed to “double dip,” collecting more than one public pension.

But these are the exceptions. Most public employees don’t have generous pensions. After a career with annual pay averaging less than $45,000, the typical newly-retired public employee receives a pension of $19,000 a year. Few would call that overly generous.

And most of that $19,000 isn’t even on taxpayers’ shoulders. While they’re working, most public employees contribute a portion of their salaries into their pension plans. Taxpayers are directly responsible for only about 14 percent of public retirement benefits. Remember also that many public workers aren’t covered by Social Security, so the government isn’t contributing 6.25 of their pay into the Social Security fund as private employers would.

There is more to Reich's argument. Go read the whole post.

I'm amazed that Americans get tricked and fooled time and again by the right wing media and politicians. When will people wake up. They are being done in not by other working stiffs. They are being done in by the top 0.5% of the population who have seen their wealth explode, their income explode, and their grip over politics tighten during the last 30 years. These ultra-rich have brought back the Gilded Age with all the privileges of wealth. They have ground down the taxpayers, the unions, the poor. They have demonized those on the left who want to build a better world.

Reagan asked a good question in 1980 when he won his election: Are you better off than you were 4 years ago? The answer then was "no" because of stagflation, oil shortages, and the collapse of the stock market. But after 30 years of Reaganomics, the trickle-down economy, the question is: Are you better off than you were 30 years ago? The overwhelming answer has to be "no".

Reich finishes his post by revealing the "hidden agenda" of the Republican party:

Don’t get me wrong. When times are tough, public employees should have to make the same sacrifices as everyone else. And they are right now. Pay has been frozen for federal workers, and for many state workers across the country as well.

But isn’t it curious that when it comes to sacrifice, Republicans don’t include the richest people in America? To the contrary, they insist the rich should sacrifice even less, enjoying even larger tax cuts that expand public-sector deficits. That means fewer public services, and even more pressure on the wages and benefits of public employees.

It’s only average workers – both in the public and the private sectors – who are being called upon to sacrifice.

This is what the current Republican attack on public-sector workers is really all about. Their version of class warfare is to pit private-sector workers against public servants. They’d rather set average working people against one another – comparing one group’s modest incomes and benefits with another group’s modest incomes and benefits – than have Americans see that the top 1 percent is now raking in a bigger share of national income than at any time since 1928, and paying at a lower tax rate. And Republicans would rather you didn’t know they want to cut taxes on the rich even more.

That's it: class war. The Republicans have been bought and sold to cater to the interests of the rich. They are willing to sell everybody else down the river. But they will fight tooth & nail to save their patrons, the ultra-rich.