One objection from a reader to my piece today on tax-dodging government employees: “Why stop with firing tax-delinquent government workers?” the reader asks. “Why not require that private-sector workers be fired for not paying their taxes, too?”
I think that government workers ought to be paying their taxes for the same reason that psychoanalysts are required to undergo psychoanalysis: to make sure that they experience the practice from both ends.
Here’s the part of the story that makes my head spin all the way around like that little girl in The Exorcist:
And it’s not like Joe Bureaucrat can’t afford to pay his share of the taxes that support the governing caste. Federal workers receive salaries about 20 percent higher than those of private-sector workers in comparable jobs, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers analyzed by USA Today. But it’s the benefits that really tell the story: The average private-sector worker receives health-care and retirement benefits worth $9,882 per year. The number for government workers? Try $40,785.
Derb is right: Get a government job.