Free Republic

Donald Trump plans to hit the ground running when he takes office on Friday, assigning "landing teams" to coordinate with federal agencies to cut some department budgets by as much as 10% while slashing 20% from the federal workforce. Washington Examiner: The cuts would target discretionary spending, not mandated programs such as Medicare or Social Security, the sources said. The spending reductions are expected to be used to help pay for Trump's plan to boost the Pentagon's budget, tax cuts and some pet projects, potentially including the anti-immigration wall on the nation's southern border. The teams also are looking at...

Today, the findings of a recent Cato Institute study on government vs. private-sector compensation were summarized and reported by Elizabeth Harrington of the Washington Free Beacon. The headline summed it all up: Study: Government Workers Make 78 Percent More than Private Sector. I was shocked, aghast, nearly apoplectic. Who would have thought that government workers are better off than their private-sector counterparts? Could the government workforce, especially the federal workforce, be a privileged class? An elite? Indeed they are. And I’ve grown sick and tired of the latest, most fashionable liberal catch-phrase—White Privilege. It is the federal bureaucracy that is...

A record of 8,733,461 workers took federal disability insurance payments in June 2012, according to the Social Security Administration. That was up from 8,707,185 in May. There has been a dramatic shrinkage in the United States over the past 20 years in the number of workers actually employed and earning paychecks per worker who is not employed and is taking federal disability insurance payments. n June 1992, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 118,419,000 people employed in the United States, and, according to the Social Security Administration, there were 3,334,333 workers taking federal disability payments. That equaled...