Sunday, August 15, 2010

Obama, Pelosi and Reid: Putting Government First



By Patrick J. Buchanan (Creators Syndicate) - Las Vegas Review-Journal

Where a man's purse is, there his heart will be also.

If you wish to know where the heart of the Obama party 
is today, consider: In the dog says of August, with temperatures 
in D.C. rising above 100, Nancy Pelosi called the House back to 
Washington to enact legislation that could not wait until September.

Purpose: Vote $ 26 billion to prevent layoffs of state, county 
and municipal employees whose own governments had decided 
they had to be let go if they were to meet their constitutional duty 
to balance their books.

Workers their own governments thought expendable, Congress 
decided were so essential it borrowed another 26 thousand 
million dollars from China to keep them on state and local 
payrolls.

A nation whose national debt is approaching its gross national 
product, that goes abroad to borrow to keep non-essential 
workers on the government payroll, is a nation on the way 
down and out. 
And anyone who thinks the party of Obama, Reid and Pelosi
is ever going to cull the armies of tens of millions of government
workers or scores of millions of government beneficiaries to put
America's house in order is deluding himself.

As long as this Congress and White House remain in power, a
U.S. default on its national debt is inevitable. The only question
is when.

Nor is this the first time the Obama Administration has rushed to 
save workers whose own state, city and county governments
were prepared to let go. Among the reasons the $800 billion
stimulus failed is that so little of it was directed to firing up 
the locomotive of the economy, the private sector, and so much
of it was spent to ensure that government workers did not have to 
share in the national sacrifice.

Why Pelosi and Co. felt compelled to return to D.C., to ensure
that state and local government payrolls were not pared, is 
not hard to understand.

Which party does the American Federation of Teachers, 
The National Education Association, and the American 
Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees
usually contribute to, work for, vote for?
At which of the two party conventions are teachers 
and government employees hugely over-represented?

Consider too, the states deepest in debt and facing
the largest cuts in employee ranks, pay and benefits:
California, Illinois, New York.

In these states, public employees earn an average of 
$10,000 more a year in pay and benefits than the
average American worker who is bailing them out.

Hence, we have a situation where private-sector workers
in Middle America are being taxed, their children driven
deeper into debt so government employees who have 
greater job security than they do, and earn more in pay
and benefits than they will ever earn, can stay in Fat City.

And folks wonder why so many Americans detest 
government.

In the same week that Congress came back to 
prevent AFSCME from taking a haircut, the
Wall Street Journal reported that in 2009,
only three of 52 metro areas with populations
over 1 million  saw "net earnings and the broader
measure of personal income both rise".

Are you surprised to learn that Washington D.C.
is #1 among the three?

That same day, USA Today had a startling report
on how, during the last decade, U.S. Government
workers, like Wall Street bankers, left their fellow 
Americans in the dust.

"Federal workers have been awarded bigger average 
pay and benefit increases than private employees
for nine years in a row, The compensation gap
between federal and private workers has doubled
in the past decade.

"Federal civil servants earned average pay and 
benefits of $123,049 in 2009 while private 
workers earned $61,051 in total compensation.
The federal compensation advantage has grown
from $30,415 in 2000 to $ 61,998 last year. "

Remarkable. U.S. government workers, who
enjoy the greatest job security of any Americans,
now earn twice as much in pay and benefits as the 
average American. This is not the D.C. some of
us grew up in.

Nor is all of this Obama's doing. For most of the
fat years of the federal work force came while
Washington was being run by Big Government 
Conservatives and a White House of Bush-Cheney
Republicans.

No wonder the Tea party is targeting both parties.

Nevertheless, it is impossible to believe that the
Obamaites, who intervened twice and massively
with bailouts to prevent minor layoffs of local
and state government employees, have the stomach 
to do the major surgery needed to cut the federal
monolith down to size.

For the vast majority of government employees
vote Democratic, as do the vast majority of the
scores of millions of beneficiaries of federal, state,
and local programs.

What Pelosi and Co. were saying with the $26
billion bailout was "We are going to protect
our own".

Which is why either Obama, Reid, Pelosi and 
Co. go, or we are Gone.


  
 

1 comment:

  1. Pat Buchanan is a tool. He only has bad ideas. The GOP has NO ideas except for bailing out big business, wall street, and giving unpaid for tax cuts to the rich. He pretends that bureaucrats got bailed out when infact it was teachers, policemen, and other first responders. Obama and the Democrats put America first in that 26 billion dollar rescue and anyone who disagrees is a willfully ignorant fool lacking in the necessary patriotism these hard times require.

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