Governments at every level ought to cap public-sector wages and benefits at private-sector comparables.
It’s time for the Fairness Initiative. And for Mike Pompeo.
• I wrote last week about a report from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity (CTUP), the group headed by The Redoubtables — Steve Moore, Steve Forbes, and Art Laffer — to the effect that the average government employee now makes more in wages and benefits than the average private-sector employee. Forty percent more.
• Some readers begged to differ. Not to contest the general point that government workers are more highly compensated, but rather to assert that CTUP’s 40 percent number is too high. I spent a morning rooting around in the data and concluded preliminarily that, at least for comparable work — on an apples-to-apples basis, that is, rather than fruit-to-fruit — the 40 percent figure may be considerably understated.
• But just this once, let’s leave the money details to one side. Let’s talk about the principle of the thing.
• It has long been embedded in the national imagination that the government worker, at some financial sacrifice to himself, is serving the nation we all share as fellow citizens. Thus the term “public servant,” which carries with it the clear implication that the private citizen is thought to be superior, in terms of the civic hierarchy at least, to the government employee.
• How then, did the government employee come to enjoy virtually lifetime job security while at the same time becoming more highly compensated than the people he is said to be serving?
• The answer is that, over the years, you have given the government employee one raise after another, one health-care benefit after another, one pension bump after another.
• Do you remember why you did so? Was it to express your gratitude to Homeland Security for keeping you safe in your person and secure in your property? Was it because Internal Revenue had been so prompt and courteous in its various communications with you? Was it because Veterans Affairs had been so responsive to your post-combat needs?
• You probably don’t recall those compensation discussions because you were not part of them. The “negotiations” to set pay and benefits for government employees, which are conducted between two groups of government employees, tend to be resolved quickly and with alarming amicability. On one side of the table are union officials representing government workers. On the other side are government employees representing you and your fellow taxpayers. You did not choose those representatives. In all likelihood, you are unaware that they are representing you. They were chosen for you by Joe Biden. And when the two parties get down to hard bargaining, there is no unseemly discord. Not a single fistfight has been reported.
• We know, thanks to NR’s Dominic Pino, that the Congressional Budget Office now projects federal budget deficits to “grow steadily over the next 30 years.” In other words, the federal government will one day soon be pressured by debt markets to look not just for revenues but for savings.
• The planets may thus be aligned to bring forward — drum roll, please — the Fairness Initiative.
• Don’t press me for details, but more than a decade back I had engaged a purple-state governor to propose, as part of his annual budget message, this initiative at the state level — at a time when government compensation packages were feared to be approaching private-sector pay levels. The governor, alas, ran into serious and ultimately terminal political troubles and soon faded from view. Stuff happens. In his stead, then, I present herewith the Fairness Initiative, suitable for governments at the federal, state, and local levels: It shall be the policy of this government to cap public-sector wages and benefits at private-sector comparables.
• It’s only fair.
• And a note to the nonsocialists of all parties: Take this idea and run with it. There are no royalties payable.
• As some of you will have noticed, I have been plumping here and elsewhere for the selection of Mike Pompeo as the GOP vice-presidential nominee. My support is based on the fact that, unlike the other possibilities floated in recent weeks, Pompeo is ready now to assume line responsibility for one of the salient challenges facing the country — our national security — and he is ready to serve now as commander in chief should a vacancy materialize in the Oval Office.
• There is another reason, a tactical reason, to support him. Unlike the other possibilities — most of them small-state governors and obscure congresspersons — Pompeo comes fully vetted in a year when the media will surely give Trump’s choice a full, head-to-toe body scan. Pompeo, who finished first in his class at West Point, has been vetted since he was a teenager.
• It is always a good time, but especially so during Easter week, to give a thought to those less fortunate than ourselves. I think today of those nine people who will never outlive the memory that they finished behind Joe Biden in law school. Thoughts and prayers, my friends.