Did Class Envy Bring Down the American Public Sector?.....

For eons we’ve heard the cries from liberals that “Wall Street greed caused Main Street need.”

The Left, led by its AFL/CIO, SEIU, along with its other Public Sector Union allies assailed Wall Street’s “Money Machine” at every opportunity and many honest, hard-working employees went along with it, as the “fixed economic pie” (“there’s only so much money to go around”) argument resonated with many of them.

Wittingly or, more likely not, those folks were pressing for the eradication of the same “Money machine” that supplied the revenues that funded a very bloated public sector and the very generous entitlements (defined benefits pensions, paid health-care, etc.) that often came with those jobs.

For years automation on Wall Street (online trading replaced thousands of big-buck stock trading jobs) was slowly, but steadily eroding many once high-paying, highly-taxed Wall Street jobs.

When the mortgage meltdown and the subsequent global credit crisis it spurred , caused by government’s micro-managing the banking industry (legislating and litigating what Andy Cuomo, then head of HUD, called “affirmative action in lending” in the form of subprime lending), occurred in 2008, it triggered “the end of Wall Street as we knew it.”

That’s a done deal.

Today, Wall Street is forever changed.

The stock market will go on. Sound investors will still reap huge profits (and rightly so) and new companies will continue to emerge and grow or fail as they will, but Wall Street’s high-income generating “Money machine,” which was responsible for so much of the revenues that we all depended upon (New York sent far more TO Washington than it ever got back thanks to that “Wall Street Money machine”) is gone for good.

It isn’t coming back...and neither are all those revenues that once supported all those public sector jobs.

Wall Street, GM, Ford and most of America’s private sector has already contracted greatly. It’s bloodletting and job-shedding is mostly done, but the public sector’s is only just beginning!

For better or worse, and for many people it’s going to get much, MUCH worse. Our public sectors (federal, state and local) are going to contract. Pension and other benefits like pensionable overtime, retirement after 20 years are going to be eradicated.

These benefits packages DID attract many higher skilled, more motivated people into the public sector, but with sharply reduced revenues they can no longer be afforded.

The irony is that after years of bashing “fat cats” and Wall Street’s “Money machine,” the Left has finally gotten what it’s wanted, but it’s come with some very serious “unintended consequences” – one being the ongoing decimation of America’s once bloated public sector.

Just as we witnessed "the end of Wall Street as we knew it," we will almost certainly also witness "the end of America's vaunted public service sector, as we knew it."


Cynical Politics

The Left is banking on this Public Sector bloodletting fracturing the Tea party and (hopefully, from their vantage) bringing many Independents back to their side in time for 2012.


Unfortunately, neither the facts, nor the logistics on this issue are in their favor. Numerous Democratic Governors (from Cuomo to Brown) are looking to pare down their own public sectors and a recent Rsmussen Poll shows that over 60% of Americans believe that public sector employees should pay as much of a portion of their pension and health-care benefits as private sector employees do. 

Moreover a full fifty percent (50%) of voters favor reducing their home state’s government payroll by one percent a year for 10 years either by reducing the number of state employees or by cutting the pay of state workers, while only twenty-eight percent (28%) oppose a cut of this nature. Another 23% aren’t sure about it.

The "end of Wall Street as we knew it" has made the "end of America's vaunted (and often bloated) public sector as we knew it," all but inevitable. BOTH Democratic and Republican Governors are slashing state payrolls, AND the public seems very much in support of that.