Recently, the TaxPayers' Alliance released a report Council Spending Uncovered II: Middle Management Pay. In this report, we showed that local government had increased the number of jobs paying £50,000-plus per year by 22 per cent, increasing the public bill by more than 20 per cent. Take that in stride when thousands of jobs are being lost in the private sector every week and pay rises across the country are slim to none. It doesn't seem like the government gets it, does it? Public sector pay rises and massive employment increases when the taxpayers footing the bill have less and less to give is mind boggling.
However, it appears Britain isn't the only country whose government can't be mindful of economics trends.
The new bailout plan in Washington, spear-headed by new President Obama and the Democrat-run Congress, proposes over $800 billion be spent on saving or creating over 240,000 government jobs, dispersed between local, state and the federal level. A huge number of these jobs are or will be filled by people eligible for government social security and retirement payouts next year, making the public funds needed to support these new government recruits even higher. So while government is prepared to spend more on new jobs and employee benefits packages, the private sector has cut back spending considerably, both at work and with their private funds; recent reports show personal savings have increased from .2 to 2.9 per cent from the first to last quarter in the United States, marking a huge shift in spending mentality. So it seems a bit counter-intuitive that government would devise such an outrageous increase in spending and government jobs given the circumstances.
So we ask ourselves again, does bigger government actually provide voters and taxpayers with better government and better services? This clearly remains to be seen, but right now, the question both here and abroad seems to be whether governments are considering the financial hardships of a shrinking economy on the taxpayer. It is a burden we simply are not able to bear at this point.