Here’s a great quote from the Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal which gets to the heart of the public’s growing dissatisfaction with public employees:
“Most reasonable steps to restrain public-sector employment costs are smothered by the unions. Study after study has shown that states and cities could shave 20% to 40% off the cost of many services—fire fighting, public transportation, garbage collection, administrative functions, even prison operations—through competitive contracting to private providers. But unions have blocked many of those efforts. Public employees maintain that they are underpaid relative to equally qualified private-sector workers, yet they are deathly afraid of competitive bidding for government services.”
Moore also points out that “More Americans work for the government than in manufacturing, farming, fishing, forestry, mining and utilities combined.” At this rate, we’ll ALL be working for the government soon enough.
Add to that the fact that while unemployment in the private sector in Nevada which has led the nation and has consistently been running in the 14-15 percent range, Gov. Brian Sandoval told us last week that unemployment for government workers in Nevada is just around 1 percent. This has to stop.