Great article. For amusement, my wife and I go through the list of government jobs, and laugh all morning at their pointlessness, incomprehensibility, and indeterminate purpose. It is an endless parade of unnecessary work for useless people–and this even in the middle of a terrible recession.
The federal, state and local governments have offered a non-stop jobs program for well over 50 years, inventing imaginary employment for dubious skills. But with millions of Americans on-board the government jobs train, it’s now very hard to toss them off, but toss them off we must. It’s not about across the board cuts, but about identifying essential services, retaining those skilled and useful employees, and then dumping the rest. With a solid CEO, the government could lose half the workforce and still perform as well as it does now.
But keep in mind just how many of those jobs were invented as political jobs, jobs as favors for valuable political constituencies; it will not be easy to target those departments. And the way the government imaginary employment complex works when cuts are applied is to intentionally withhold valuable services and retain the most useless services so that when the cuts are applied, people notice the missing services. The government mafia then blames the cuts for the pain, never intending to seriously look into removing or eliminating whole departments that do little or nothing useful.
