Government Growth
Oh, my:
“Federal, state and local governments are hiring new workers at the fastest pace in six years, helping offset job losses in the private sector.
Governments added 76,800 jobs in the first three months of 2008, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.
That’s the biggest jump in first-quarter hiring since a boom in 2002 that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks.”
Source: USA Today
If a government entity is truly understaffed and has the money available, I’m all for adding more firemen or whatever. Government organizations generally operate on a detailed budget and have great difficulty adapting to changes… just listen to legislators when costs rise and they seek more funding.
Now, we have government growing in size while the private sector is shrinking. Why is that? Won’t those people have to be paid? Yes. How will they get paid? From tax money collected from you and me! There is no free lunch so, if these jobs weren’t already built in to the budget, the budget will increase… at our expense.
If government really wants to help provide jobs, the very best thing that could happen would be to LOWER TAXES, not increase them. Companies would then have more resources for adding jobs, building new locations, deploying new products, and so on. It is far better to let the market create jobs naturally than to artificially (and temporarily) spawn jobs by decree.
There seems to be little incentive for government to operate efficiently and many motivations for it to expand its scope. Thinking citizens must be watchdogs and resist any movement in the wrong direction.
