From Mark Steyn’s excellent blog:
"The other day The Washington Post previewed one aspect of this Saturday’s Jon Stewart rally – a march by government workers:
Organizers of the ‘Government Doesn’t Suck March’ (their choice of words, not ours) were inspired in part by last week’s Washington Post poll that revealed widespread negative perceptions of federal workers.
‘We hear it day in and day out: the government sucks, federal employees are lazy and their positions are redundant,’ said march organizer Steve Ressler, founder of GovLoop, a social networking Web site for public servants.
‘It’s time to turn the tables and remind the world that government employees just happen to be people — people that don’t suck,’ Ressler said in a message sent to The Federal Eye on Sunday announcing the march. Government workers ‘are a lot of cool cats’ who work hard, listen to good music and watch Stewart’s ‘The Daily Show,’ ‘but that’s all after they’ve spent a whole day keeping the country running,’ he said.
Actually, government does suck. It sucks too much money out of my pocket and gives it to Steve Ressler and his fellow “cool cats”…. "
"And they’re not running the country, but running it into the ground. In the 18 months after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, over seven million Americans lost their jobs, yet the percentage of federal bureaucrats earning $100,000 or more went up from 14 per cent to 19 per cent: An economic downturn for you, but not for them. They’re upturn girls living in a downturn world. At the start of the “downturn” the Department of Transportation had just one employee earning more than $170,000 per year. Eighteen months later, it had 1,690.In the year after the passage of Obama’s “stimulus”, the private sector lost 2.5 million jobs, but the federal government gained 416,000 jobs. Even if one accepts the government’s ludicrous concept of “creating or saving” jobs, by its own figures four out of every five jobs “created or saved” were government jobs. “Stimulus” stimulates government, not the economy. It’s part of the remorseless governmentalization of American life.
When the subject of the leviathan comes up, the media and other statism groupies tend to say, ‘Oh, well, it’s easy to talk about cutting government spending, until you start looking at individual programs, most of which tend to be very popular.’
‘Programs’ is a sly word. Regardless of the merits of the ‘program’, it requires human beings to run it. And government humans cost more than private humans. In 2009, the average civilian employee of the United States government earned $81,258 in salary plus $41,791 in benefits. Total: $123,049."
Read the rest of the ugly situation HERE.