04/12/2011
Mickey Kaus points to this Chris Moody article at the Daily Caller:If you're one of the millions of Americans still looking for a job, the federal government is hiring, and (especially for the unemployed) the pay is excellent. While private sector job growth creeps along at a snail’s pace, the roster of available federal jobs is booming. The Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs needs someone to run the Facebook page for the Dept. of the Interior and they'll pay up to $115,000 a year.You know, when people ask me why I haven’t got my own Facebook page, now I have an excuse: I'd like to, but I just can’t afford to pay somebody $115,000 per year. (I don’t even want to think about how much the Bureau of Indian Affairs' Twitter guru is costing us.)
In Washington, D.C., there are more than 1,000 openings this month alone … a $155,000-a-year gig at the Peace Corps to ensure the agency is complying with Equal Opportunity Employment standards; and a similar job at the Dept. of Transportation that promises nearly $180,000 a year.No salary is too high to pay to keep white people from hogging all the great Peace Corp gigs digging ditches and catching weird tropical diseases (like this ex-Peace Corps volunteer I know who got sick in Nepal 35 years ago and who doesn’t appear to have recovered from it yet). Mickey comments:
That’s what’s so annoying about all the calls from respectable Beltwayish opinion leaders to stop cutting the non-defense discretionary budget and focus on entitlements, because “that’s where the big money is.' From one perspective, this is a rational argument. That is where the big money is. From another perspective, it looks like a tacit conspiracy of Washingtonians not to sacrifice the jobs of any of their friends, or the local economy, by any kind of actual slimming down (of the sort a private company in similar straits would have undertaken years ago). … In effect, the respectable "pivot to entitlements" position says,"we're going to cut Social Security checks and Medicare for mid-income old people to save the jobs of $180K equal opportunity officers at the DOT."
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