A Tale of Two Parties

Posted By on February 17, 2011 at 3:04 pm

Over the last couple of years, the country has seen hundreds of public demonstrations calling for fiscal responsibility. This movement has come to be known as the Tea Party.

This week in Wisconsin, unionized public sector employees are having a conniption because they don’t want to make contributions to their own benefit plans that are a fraction of the size of the contributions private sector workers have to pay. They are what we might refer to as the Me-Me-Me Party.

When I was back in school after my time in the Army, we had a classmate who was, shall we say, just a bit dim. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer. One sandwich short of a picnic. Rather dumb.

She was also not particularly ambitious. One day we were talking with the professor about our upcoming careers — what we wanted to do, where we wanted to be. At the time I was looking forward to coding COBOL in a bank basement somewhere (I guess I got lucky when I went into networking.) When it came to be this woman’s turn to state her goals, she almost proudly stated that she was looking to go to work for the government.

(Bear in mind, this was the mid-90s. Tech was already a huge and expanding field, with virtually limitless opportunity).

When asked her motivation for wanting to go into the civil service, the only reason she gave was, and I quote: “You can’t be fired.”

She said that.

Out loud.

And showed no sign of shame about it.

Well, it’s about 16 years later now, and I’m guessing this in-duh-vidual is one of those who will be facing the chopping block when the budgetary axe falls, as it eventually must, in California.

It was a mistake ever to allow the civil service to unionize, and it’s long past time for states to begin taking a Reagan/PATCO approach to fixing the problem. I’m sure there are plenty of unemployed folks who’d love to have some of those jobs, for far less than the current overpaid employees are costing the rest of us.

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