The Mad Mogambo on public sector employment and impending retirement costs ...
(snip)"-- One of the places where Fed-supplied monetary inflation ended up (after percolating through the housing bubble) is in the hands of state and local governments, which happily spent the enormous out-of-nowhere revenue streams of the last few years that resulted from the housing bubble. And in their idiocy and damnable stupidity, they thought that such sudden money flows would be permanent, unending, and eternally increasing, and they spent it like that silliness was true or something! Hahaha! Fools!
And now, in addition to expensive and perpetual new benefits and services being larded out like candy to the electorate, at every level of government in America (which collectively employs one out of every seven workers in the country), public-service employees now receive such generous pay-and-benefit packages that they are literally unknown anywhere outside of government, and by a long shot, too!
When the average household income in America is somewhere between $35,000 and $50,000 a year (which seems roughly to be the range of estimates), the annual compensation for government employees and officials commonly run to much more than that! Often to a hundred thousand dollars, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes even millions of dollars for top echelon employees of any government, agency, bureau, department, university, school system, etc. receiving tax money! Almost half the police in Boston make more than $100,000 a year!
Hell, here in Pinellas Park, not only do all the employees make more in salary than the average household income, but they also get astonishingly generous benefit plans, exemplified by the City's employee pension plan, which GUARANTEES at least a 9.5% return on their invested pension money! Any shortfall suffered by the fund by a market downturn is to be collected, by law, from the taxpayers! A guaranteed minimum return of 9.5%! Double what the historical return of the stock market, even given generous assumptions, has been! Double! Such grubby, greedy arrogance on behalf of public-service employees is absolutely unbelievable and completely unprecedented!
And there are 22 million government employees already, which is not to mention all the retirees we're already supporting, or (if you want to talk about a population bubble heading towards us!) the future bubble of these massive numbers of new government employees moving to retirement in the future, all with their fat and fabulous retirement packages!
If I haven't said it enough until you are sick of hearing it, We're freaking doomed!
Productivity, or output (GDP) per hour of labor, is supposed to have risen by 1.6% in the fourth quarter of last year. Big deal. The way I figure it, the inflation in prices contributed the whole of the rise in GDP, and that's why GDP went up to start with.
And then they lie about the true rate of inflation when they have to deflate the raw GDP numbers by the rate of inflation to get "real" GDP growth, so it still looks like the economy grew! And with not many more people working (they didn't produce any more actual stuff, so there was no need to hire more people) you will get, by simple arithmetic, higher productivity! Hahaha! And even so, the best they can get is 1.9%? Hahaha! We're freaking doomed!
The bad news is that labor costs jumped up by a whopping 6.6% in the fourth quarter! As regards this woeful statistic, I notice that nobody mentioned that a lot of new, higher minimum-wage laws went into effect after the last elections in the fourth quarter, and I am apparently the only one rude enough to mention that labor costs rising 6.6% is exactly the kind of thing you would expect from forcing the minimum wage to rise by 40%! Hahaha! Did anybody really think that labor costs would go down by forcing the employers to pay 40% more? Hahaha!
And now does anybody still believe that prices will not go up, too, when the price of labor is forced up? They do? Hahaha! We're idiots! Hahaha! ?
And speaking of jobs, Bob B had another take on the jobs report. He writes " I haven't had time to study the components, but 97,000 jobs were added. That's 3,464 per day"
The humourous offset was that "In February, an estimated 252,000 people turned 62 years of age. That's 9,000 per day." "(snip)
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