Does this number surprise anyone? Bureaucracy breeds top-heavy weasels who will be seen popping in and out of holes throughout the United States. How do unions fit in this scenario?
New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) show that a majority of American union members now work for the government. The pattern of unions adding members in government while losing members in the private sector accelerated during the recession. The typical union member now works in the Post Office, not on the assembly line.
Representing government employees has changed the union movement’s priorities: Unions now campaign for higher taxes on Americans to fund more government spending. Congress should resist government employee unions’ self-interested calls to raise taxes on workers in the private sector.
Is the sizable increase in federal workers a pay-back to unions who supported Obama? First the government makes it their duty to assure you use the “correct” light bulbs in your home; next they attempt to mandate the minimum type of health insurance you must purchase, now we have a government which is gorging itself and increasing in size on the taxpayer’s dollar.
The era of big government has returned with a vengeance, in the form of the largest federal work force in modern history.
The Obama administration says the government will grow to 2.15 million employees this year, topping 2 million for the first time since President Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over” and joined forces with a Republican-led Congress in the 1990s to pare back the federal work force.
Most of the increases are on the civilian side, which will grow by 153,000 workers, to 1.43 million people, in fiscal 2010.
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“I’m shocked that the ‘tea party’ hasn’t focused on it yet, and the Obama administration only has a thin sliver of time to deal more directly with it, I believe,” said Paul C. Light, who studies the federal bureaucracy as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor at New York University. “When you talk about big government, you’re talking about a big employer.”
The new figures are contained in the budget that Mr. Obama sent Monday to Congress.
Mr. Obama says the civilian work force will drop by 80,000 next year, mostly because of a reduction in U.S. census workers added in 2010 but then dropped in 2011 after the national population count is finished. That still leaves 1.35 million civilian federal employees on the payroll in 2011.
From 1981 through 2008, the civilian work force remained at about 1.1 million to 1.2 million, with a low of 1.07 million in 1986 and a high of more than 1.2 million in 1993 and in 2008. In 2009, the number jumped to 1.28 million.
Since Obama took office in 2009, the federal government added an average of 6,666.666.. employees each month. Eerie? You bet. And how does this fit in with a USA Today article from early December.. you remember, the one that stated:
The number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal salary data.Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession’s first 18 months — and that’s before overtime pay and bonuses are counted.
The free money wagon in Washington bureaucracy has exploded, while average people struggle to pay bills and find work, federal employees are living high on the hog supplied by your tax dollars.
Obama talks a good game about fiscal responsibility, heck some people probably believe the lies words which easily flow from his mouth when he makes announcements about cutting the deficit, about understanding the concern the American public feels with the run-away money train in Washington. Behind the shiny veneer though is a charlatan, a carnival barker, quick to encourage confidence yet void of empathy to the shattered hopes who have placed faith and trust in him. There is no doubt there is reason behind his madness, there is purpose, for the moment it is hidden behind illusion. But as with all illusions, as with all scam artists, as with all those who seek to perpetrate deception on the American people.. the illusion will fade, the scam artist will be exposed and the American people will rise up and declare: This is the country of WE-THE-PEOPLE.
