What makes Gov. Mike Huckabee’s blood boil?
Posted By RichC on September 18, 2010
Although I can’t admit to being a political supporter of Mike Huckabee last go around, I do enjoy his commentary and occasionally his television program – Huckabee. In a recent email he shared his frustration with our out of control bureaucracy — he writes that it “made my blood boil.” (and it does the same for me)
“At a time when workers’ pay and benefits have stagnated,” reported USA Today, “federal employees’ average compensation has grown to more than double what private sector workers earn.”
Did you get that? More than double. To be exact, federal employees now average $123,049 in pay and benefits, while private-sector employees make $61,051 in total compensation, according to the government’s own Bureau of Economic Analysis.
That’s a pay gap of $61,998 — up from $30,415 in 2000.
And that’s not even counting the absurdly generous retirement benefits that allow many federal employees to retire with lifetime pensions and health insurance after little more than two decades on the job.
Time was, government work involved a tradeoff between job security and pay — you got more of the former and less of the latter than in the private sector. Not anymore. Now, you get the best of everything — inflated pay, gold-plated benefits, total job security, and a cushy taxpayer-funded retirement starting as early as your mid-40s.
This is beyond scandalous. This is plunder, pure and simple. Washington is siphoning off the wealth of millions of private citizens and businesses to support a vast and growing government leisure class whose only concern, it seems, is to further augment their perks and privileges at taxpayer expense.
What can we do as citizens? Vote the bums out, for starters — beginning with the Democratic Congress in November, followed by President Obama in 2012. But we can’t stop there. We have to demand that whoever takes their place — whether it’s Republicans or third-partiers — don’t go back to big-spending politics as usual.
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