Monday, August 22, 2011

A BLACK FUTURE

Via Western Rifle Shooters Association

"The problem with all these additional government jobs is that government spending does not create the economic growth needed to sustain private sector job growth."

As with all economic down turns, the one sector that does well is the federal government. The Picture of the Day for today shows an explosion of regulatory agency jobs in just the last year, while overall federal government jobs have rapidly multiplied with nearly a 12% increase while all other job sectors have dropped by about 7%.

That shows a growth in the federal government but it also brings up a troubling fact, one that is impossible to avoid in the debt and budget battles. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) touches on this fact with a recent op ed in the Wall Street Journal:
We know that our goal is to reduce spending. But we also know that America faces not just a budget deficit but also a jobs deficit. Nobody on this committee would be happy if we reduced the budget deficit but even more Americans end up losing their jobs.
The fact is, all those studies being paid for like shrimp on a treadmill and all that redundancy, duplication, and misuse of funds involves people working for a salary at the federal government.

In other words, to fix the debt, we have to lose jobs. To trim the debt down and reduce government spending to a sane and survivable level lots of federal jobs are going to be lost. That's an inevitable consequence of the federal government bloat over the last few decades; lots of new jobs added, each costing money. When you cut the spending, jobs will be lost. And because a lot of that debt was created by adding new jobs, the direct and obvious solution is to snip those jobs away.

And it gets worse. Blacks are disproportionately represented in government jobs. In fact, hiring blacks in federal jobs is so out of norm with the general population that NASA has the smallest over representation by only hiring 49% more blacks than are in the general population. Blacks make up about 10% of the United States population, but make up about 20% of the federal government jobs according to a 2010 study by the Office of Personnel Management.

So we're faced with a brutal dilemma: in order to lighten the pressure of the federal government on the economy and businesses so both can breathe and prosper, we're going to have to slash the government down in size which will result in many people losing jobs in a time of dire unemployment. And many of those lost jobs will be black jobs.

Now, which politician wants to stand up and actually do that? Which politician will vote and fight to slash jobs and fire lots of black people? And if that actually somehow takes place, what exactly do you think will happen in the press and in black America? How do you think that will be portrayed by a media which already is incredibly hostile to the idea of cutting anything in the federal government?

How do you think black activists and opportunists such as Al Sharpton will respond to something like that?

America will burn.

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