Posted on 04/01/2011 7:56:35 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
If you want to understand better why so many states—from New York to Wisconsin to California—are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.
It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers. Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees. Is it any wonder that so many states and cities cannot pay their bills?
Every state in America today except for two—Indiana and Wisconsin—has more government workers on the payroll than people manufacturing industrial goods. Consider California, which has the highest budget deficit in the history of the states. The not-so Golden State now has an incredible 2.4 million government employees—twice as many as people at work in manufacturing. New Jersey has just under two-and-a-half as many government employees as manufacturers. Florida's ratio is more than 3 to 1. So is New York's.
Even Michigan, at one time the auto capital of the world, and Pennsylvania, once the steel capital, have more government bureaucrats than people making things. The leaders in government hiring are Wyoming and New Mexico, which have hired more than six government workers for every manufacturing worker.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
My point in #17 was they (Democrats/liberals) are purposefully blurring that fact and convincing non-government taxpayer voters that their rights are being threatened too by the government union measures. They are poll testing those phrases and using them as weapons. The fact that you and I and 99% of freepers understand the issue doesn't mean we have won (yet many freepers seem to think the opposite.)
Anyway here is attempt to regain the message, I posted a thread here with this great video in it:
Youtube : A Liberal Teacher explains Union Busting
Government doesn't work.
It is too late to stop the leftist vermin. This system of government was never intended to function with half the population behaving in the most despicable way any human could ever act.
If you have children then I suggest you all kiss them goodbye. There will be NOTHING in their futures but poverty, misery, torment, and death. They are finished. They are as good as dead.
The only thing to do is get some revenge on the enemy and then take our own lives before they manage to capture us.
How many paper pushers can they hire? who’s going to do the labor work?Oh wait I got the mexicans.
Bloat in the government payroll is not limited to just the Federal government, so I'm not sure exactly what you're getting at here.
Thank you for the only sane post on this entire thread.
The statist disease is not limited to liberals. Conservatives suffer from it too.
In a word?
Secession.
A free and independent republic of Texas.
Republicans suffer from it.
Conservatives, by definition, do not.
Our last chance before plan B is the 2012 election. If we don't take both houses and the White House with a conservative revolution and if they do what needs to be done, we may survive. That's why 2012 is so important. Barring that it's on to plan B. . .
Definitions aside, many conservatives are dumb enough to vote Republican--even statist Republican--even if evidence of their statist tendencies is paraded about in public.
I’m not trying to pick a fight here.
I’m just saying that if you ARE a conservative, then statism is the exact opposite of what you believe in.
Maybe what you meant is that are people in the “Republican” party who claim to be conservatives but are only using true conservatives to keep themselves in office.
In mu opinion those people are more dangerous than the die hard liberal.
Even though he is correct on the manufacturing data it does change the reality of explosive government growth destroying our Republic. The parasite class (govt at all levels) is growing at a pace that unsustainable. The parasite class will surely crush and kill the golden goose of capitalism.
At all levels government spending and controls are pushing us towards a socialist hell. For our Republic to survive, government at ALL levels must be severely slashed.
I want so bad for us to turn it around in 2012. I really really do.
But look what has happened in WI.
The people voted in record numbers and in an historic fashion to get conservatives in office.
But, did that matter to the left? Even after they passed a LAW! the leftists have found ways to ignore the will of the people. So, although I want to believe that an electoral repudiation of statism will happen in 2012, I think that the left is too emboldened and too entrentched for elections to matter now.
you hit the nail on the head. The Statist on our side are just as dangerous as the ones on the left. Statism is a cancer on Liberty.
Not conservatives but many in the current GOP-Republican party.
That doesn't do anything to solve the problem.
A "free and independent republic of Texas" can just as easily suffer from rampant, runaway statism as a nation of fifty States and associated territories.
All governments fail. All of them. A new nation would give us the opportunity to return to first principals of liberty and then we would have a few generations before yet another eventual bloat and revolt.
Nothing new under the sun here.
It's time to go Galt, folks!
I've been explaining the situation as if this were an upside-down food pyramid. Growth and prosperity begins with the raw material and manufacturing base. If it's healthy enough, we can have a thriving service sector. On top of this is government, supported only by the profitability of all the sectors beneath it.
Unfortunately, the base is dwindling, which means there will be less demand for services, which means we can afford less and less government. But, even through this ongoing recession, government has been the one and only growth sector. It's insane.
Consumer Non-Producers !
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