Fw: We Need Bigger Government
Gregory A . Butler
Not in vogue, perhaps: We actually need a whole lot more government workers, and bigger government, to have a functioning community. It’s sad we need to make this obvious point. Public workers at every level—federal, state and local—touch virtually every hour in a 24-hour day—and most of what they do society just takes for granted. We could not get through a single day without public workers who earn a very modest living—people who get Social Security to seniors, food inspectors, park rangers, tax auditors, trash collectors, mine safety monitors, firefighters…oh, and how about air traffic controllers? The list is endless. Now, a reality: The attacks against government workers can’t be laid solely at the feet of one deranged president and his equally sociopath, richest-man-in-the-world sidekick. It’s bipartisan. We don’t have a big enough government to care for the people because we’ve had a half century of politicians from both major parties undermining government workers, spewing “free market” rubbish, bullshit about regulatory “burdens”, and letting the oligarchs rob us blind. PART 1—Envy Borne of Distress. A short story from a very cold December day almost 20 years ago will illustrate what we face today. I was picketing on the pavement outside a subway station in Manhattan in support of the 40,000 striking members of Local 100 of the Transit Workers Union. Under the odious New York State Taylor Law, the strike was illegal. Yet, the bus drivers and subway workers who operated, at the time, 6,000 subway cars and 4,500 buses that made the city work, walked out, principally because the transit authority was demanding odious pension cuts and changes, including raising the retirement age and increasing the cost of the pension to workers. The city ground to a halt for three days. A deal was eventually struck: the transit authority backed off attacking folks’ pensions but the union was forced to agree, in exchange, to a hike in workers’ health care contributions. A judge sentenced the TWU president, Robert Toussaint, to 10 days in jail for violating the Taylor Law. On the day he would begin serving the sentence, a huge procession of supporters marched with him across the Brooklyn Bridge to the lock-up (the head of yours truly, with far more hair than today, bobs in the second row, to the right, just to your left of the gentleman in the tan coat).
The point of this story: there was a consistent drumbeat during the lead-up to the strike that turned a segment of folks against the transit workers. The antipathy was fed by editorial boards who blasted the strikers, and so-called “journalists” who don’t read, lazily trade in gossip and/or know nothing about economics or labor. Sure, the transit shutdown was inconvenient. That’s what strikes do. No one wants to strike. But, when workers do strike, it’s partly to inform everyone else what’s what, sometimes by making life a little inconvenient. Hostility to the strikers exposed what everyone else lacked—a real pension and decent wages. Some folks felt, “I don’t have a guaranteed pension, why should I not be able to get around town or have to pay more for a subway ride so the subway conductor or maintenance worker can have a better pension?”. This is a national cancer. The so-called “free market” has one basic operating principle: impoverish people by keeping wages low and, then, setting people against each other. It’s the 19th Century Robber Baron Jay Gould’s vision of being able to get one half of the working class to kill the other half:
So, here we are: government workers have been set up as the enemy, falsely being blamed, explicitly or implicitly, for the crisis of empty wallets facing people in every community. What government workers do, for a very modest paycheck, is far more tangible and transparent, compared to the day-to-day siphoning off of society’s wealth into the hands of a handful of very rich oligarchs. Part II—The Shakedown Has Been Bi-Partisan. If we want to see a way out, we have to be honest how we got here. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan made famous a short screed: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help’”. But, it was Jimmy Carter who began the erosion of robust government. Look, Carter was a good ex-president; he’s the only president in my lifetime who didn’t try to stuff his pockets full of cash after leaving office, preferring to return to his very modest home in Plains, Georgia and building Habitat for Humanity homes, as opposed to, for example, snagging a rich Netflix producing contract and buying a multi-million estate on Martha’s Vineyard underwritten by velvet, legal corporate graft. But, Carter was also the father of modern de-regulation—signing in October 1978 a bill to deregulate the airline industry which was, in my view, the ignition for the decades-long “regulations are bad for you” mantra that swept through our political discourse (on your own time, and for the sake of brevity here, look up Alfred Kahn). Circa 1991: Who made it cool to take digs at public sector workers long before Project 2025? Bill Clinton, of course. He couldn’t say, “The era of big government is over” enough times to please the corporate donors who were bankrolling his campaign (and who would, for years, fund the Clintons’ grift, either by paying out, in barely-disguised legal bribery, $200,000 for hour-long, content-less speeches or through big corporate checks written to the Clinton Foundation, money designed to white-wash anti-worker, anti-community corporate behavior, co-mingled with blood-stained millions from the government of Saudi Arabia). So, fact: the federal workforce, as a percentage of all workers, has declined dramatically over the past seven decades. Telepathically, the good folks at the Center for Economic and Policy Research created this simple chart (please share!):
And that’s a problem because we live in a much more complex society than the 1950s; in 1950, the country had a bit over 150 million people. Today: north of 340 million. Observation: note the sharp decline in the 1990s during the presidency of a Democrat. (The upward, short-term blip you see around 2010 had to do with the hiring of a large number of temporary workers to perform the once-every decade census). Part III—The Private Sector “Efficiency” Scam. Putting aside the moral point of the mindless sacking right now of thousands of people who were earning a modest living to ensure that fewer people die or get sick (because government regulations, for example, keep air and water somewhat healthier and the workplace is somewhat safer) we reached this moment of madness because of the deeper rhetorical rubbish that has cast its spell over the political establishment, in both parties, for, lo, many decades: the false argument that the private sector is more “efficient” than the public sector. Cue, belly laugh. It’s nonsense. My favorite example is health care. Medicare operates at, conservatively, roughly a 2 percent administrative cost (I’ve also seen Medicare administrative costs for 2021 pegged at 1.3 percent). That “administrative cost” is a statistic that, in real life, is embodied in the labor of government employees. Private insurers? Somewhere between 15-25 percent administrative costs, depending on the analysis you pick. You’d wonder why there is a difference (okay, my readers know the answer!) Simple: Medicare is about taking care of people. Private insurance is about profit. If you kill people along the way, oh well… indeed, the entire operating principle (no pun intended) is not to make people healthy. Otherwise, the by-now quite well known “deny all claims” mantra of the industry would not exist. Let’s see, why would private insurance executives be laser-focused on profits, not on patient care? Bing! The CEOs of the top 10 health insurance companies were paid between $13 million and $22 million in total compensation in 2022. Elevance Health CEO Gail Boudreaux, for example, made $21,889,039. In the private sector, and in virtually every industry, there is what economists call a vast, vast “mis-allocation” of economic resources. In healthcare, that means the pissing away of 15 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) because of the greed of the insurers. Which, in English means, CEOs are walking away with massive paychecks because the entire so-called “free market” economy has nothing to do with a “free market”. It’s just a crony-run system. This is not news. Everyone knows it. We just lack the elected leadership to oppose it because the ideology is so ingrained in the careerist, political class. And today’s organized crime gang is simply taking the plundering to the next level by knee-capping any (modest) brakes that existed. One last point of context: you will note my parenthetical “modest” modifier above, along with the earlier “somewhat” modifiers. The full story of the hobbling of government explained in bullet points:
Speaking of efficiency via Wall Street Journal (pay wall)
Moral of the story: of course, fight the madness today. But, be bold, demand expanded government as a defense of the people. Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy Working Life Newsletter, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe.
© 2025 Jonathan Tasini
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