April 11, 2011

Your tax dollars at work

Mickey Kaus points to this Chris Moody article at the Daily Caller:
If you’re one of the millions of Americans still looking for a job, the federal government is hiring, and (especially for the unemployed) the pay is excellent. While private sector job growth creeps along at a snail’s pace, the roster of available federal jobs is booming. The Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs needs someone to run the Facebook page for the Dept. of the Interior and they’ll pay up to $115,000 a year. 

You know, when people ask me why I haven't got my own Facebook page, now I have an excuse: I'd like to, but I just can't afford to pay somebody $115,000 per year. (I don't even want to think about how much the Bureau of Indian Affairs' Twitter guru is costing us.)
In Washington, D.C., there are more than 1,000 openings this month alone ... a $155,000-a-year gig at the Peace Corps to ensure the agency is complying with Equal Opportunity Employment standards; and a similar job at the Dept. of Transportation that promises nearly $180,000 a year.

No salary is too high to pay to keep white people from hogging all the great Peace Corp gigs digging ditches and catching weird tropical diseases (like this ex-Peace Corps volunteer I know who got sick in Nepal 35 years ago and who doesn't appear to have recovered from it yet).

Mickey comments:
That’s what’s so annoying about all the calls from respectable Beltwayish opinion leaders to stop cutting the non-defense discretionary budget and focus on entitlements, because ‘that’s where the big money is.’ From one perspective, this is a rational argument. That is where the big money is. From another perspective, it looks like a tacit conspiracy of Washingtonians not to sacrifice the jobs of any of their friends, or the local economy, by any kind of actual slimming down (of the sort a private company in similar straits would have undertaken years ago).  … In effect, the respectable ”pivot to entitlements” position says,”we’re going to cut Social Security checks and Medicare for mid-income old people to save the jobs of $180K equal opportunity officers at the DOT.” 

37 comments:

Anonymous said...

Diversity positions seem to be especially well-paid:

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Senior Deputy Director, Office of Minority and Women Inclusion:

SALARY RANGE: $183,805.00 - $250,000.00/year

Any guesses as to how much Junior Deputy Director at this all-important Office is paid?

RKU said...

The 7089th piece of evidence that the parasites are indeed devouring the host...

Anonymous said...

Steve, I don't think you realize the immense value that our nation derives from Chief Diversity Officers and Minority Outreach HR Directors. Trust me, diversity is at the core of our economy's vibrancy. I think that if we gotta cut, we should cut border security.

Oh, wait. We can't cut border security. We don't even have any border security.

Chicago said...

Sounds mostly like some government hire-a-black program. Do they reject applicants with criminal records (see story three articles down) ?
Are there any blacks actually working at the lower level of the Peace Corp? I thought it was some SWPL sort of pursuit. Isn't it an anachronism at this point? Perhaps it's useful in providing cover for spying or mapping out where there might be some untapped natural resources, using the starry-eyed recruits as a front.

The Anti-Gnostic said...

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Senior Deputy Director, Office of Minority and Women Inclusion:

SALARY RANGE: $183,805.00 - $250,000.00/year


I say vote Obama 2012--the gotterdammerung can't come fast enough.

Duncan said...

This ship is going down. Any sperg on this board that thinks there is a political solution is dreaming. Worse is better now.

Anonymous said...

"You know, when people ask me why I haven't got my own Facebook page, now I have an excuse: I'd like to, but I just can't afford to pay somebody $115,000 per year. (I don't even want to think about how much the Bureau of Indian Affairs' Twitter guru is costing us.)"

But how do you know the government is not paying some guy $200,000 to run a google blog for Hawaiian affairs?

Anonymous said...

The most overpaid public employees are the executive at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and the rest of the government subsidized Wall Street banks. This neoliberal Harvard scumbag just want to deflect blame from the incompetent overpaid CEOs who wrecked the economy.

Anonymous said...

The Federal government pays well for the rank and file because it doesn't waste money on executives or dividends. If a typical Federal agency operated like a Fortune 500 company the staff would get paid less but tens of millions would be sucked up to the top. The Bush experiments with contracting all wound up as costly failures.

Anonymous said...

It's funny, but during the housing bubble there wasn't much attention to federal salaries. According to one Steve Sailer circa 2007:

"Clearly, growing economic inequality leaves the civil service hard pressed to compete for the finest workers versus Goldman Sachs's bonuses and Google's stock options."

Federal employees get a decent secure income in return for forfeiting the supposed sacred American Dream of being able to become rich. Private sector workers who cashed in on stock options or inflated home equity didn't have anything to say about this a few years ago, and civil servants didn't begrudge them for it. It's hypocritical and pathetic when crybabies want to change the rules of a tradeoff as soon as it's not going their way. If you want better salaries and pensions in the private sector then support unions, and stop voting for politicians who want to eliminate Medicare and destroy the remaining middle class.

Anonymous said...

You never used to hear much about government employees until the Wall Street boys wrecked the economy and in return are still getting salaries several orders of magnitude larger than any civil servant, all courtesy of the government. Somehow this feels like a big misdirection, primarily aimed at teachers.

jody said...

"The Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs needs someone to run the Facebook page for the Dept. of the Interior and they’ll pay up to $115,000 a year."

is this real life?

Anonymous said...

Given the legislative pressure on federal employees I'm surprised their unions haven't pushed for bringing back civil service tests. No one criticizes Harvard graduates (like the elitist Kaus) for having high salaries because everyone knows they have high IQs. A lot of angst toward government workers comes from the view that they're incompetent, and a gatekeeping test would provide an objective counterargument. Of course, the highly paid equal opportunity officers might not see it this way.

Anonymous said...

I give up. I have been away for about three days and you have just plastered this place with great posts. Sometimes you leave the posts up for awhile, but other times you go wild. I figured I could catch up, but not now.

Anonymous said...

As the first Anonymous said: "Diversity positions seem to be especially well-paid". Well, sort of. Non-civil service patronage positions (the kind you get for your knucklehead nephew who hasn't managed to pass the bar exam, in return for $20K per year of party contributions) do pay really well, because there are essentially no limits on the salary, other than political, and the job may not last past the next administration. Diversity jobs are just a subset of that. What do these people actually do? I have been in government for over 20 years, and I still don't know.

Anonymous said...

Some of you debating the quantum of fair pay for civil servants are missing the point: We don't need diversity directors or government facebook pages at ANY price. And the corrollary is that the brighter and more educated such recruits are, the greater mischief they will do.
Gilbert Pinfold.

Anonymous said...

"If you want better salaries and pensions in the private sector then support unions"

Or you'll do what to our thumbs?

Anonymous said...

"If a typical Federal agency operated like a Fortune 500 company the staff would get paid less but tens of millions would be sucked up to the top."

I once worked at a government agency that dealt with insurance companies. Regular case workers for the agency and for private insurance companies were paid about the same, but the cubicles at the agency were larger and nicer. More importantly, the agency offered far, far better job security and vacation time.

On a tour of an insurance company with which we dealt I was most shocked by the CFO's office. No one at the government agency where I worked, including its head, had even a fifth of that space for an office. The furniture inside also screamed of wealth. The bosses at my agency used stuff that seemed to have been ordered from Staples instead.

The moral is quite predictable: if you're going to be a worker bee, make sure to sign up with a government-owned hive. If you have bigger ambitions, don't.

Anonymous said...

"...and a gatekeeping test would provide an objective counterargument. Of course, the highly paid equal opportunity officers might not see it this way."

It's not just equal opportunity officers. No boss wants to hire strangers from civil service lists. Anyone who has any say in this is in favor of hiring friends instead. To be honest, if I were in that position, I'd hire friends too. What sort of a weirdo wouldn't?

The most efficient set-up - not the one I'd want to work in, but the one that produces the best results - involves a dictator at the top who is personally vested in the organization's success. A smart, ruthless a*hole, a Steve Jobs or a Napoleon Bonaparte. Someone whom the rank and file can fear. That's the most effective counterweight to everyone trying to sponge off the organization, to hire friends, to play office politics with the organization's money.

I think that this is as true of politics as it is of business. Democracy is seriously overrated.

Truth said...

What the article doesn't tell you is that it is almost impossible to get federal job right now without active duty military service.

Anonymous said...

"Federal employees get a decent secure income in return for forfeiting the supposed sacred American Dream of being able to become rich.?

Right.Everyone in the govt could have become a CEO and gotten rich. It's like teachers pretending they are sacrificing for the kids because they could have become rich in the private sector.

Anonymous said...

"The Federal government pays well for the rank and file because it doesn't waste money on executives or dividends."

That, and it has the power to tax everyone and throw them in jail if they don't pay, and to finance debt based on that power to tax, and also has the power to print money at will. You left that part out.

headache said...

Sounds like the new black South African government. They have lots of these types of jobs for blacks only, but are scrambling to keep a semblance of the old white infrastructure running, mostly using whites which had been fired previously as subcontractors. In net you get a much lower quality of public service for much more tax money.

Mr. Anon said...

"Truth said...

What the article doesn't tell you is that it is almost impossible to get federal job right now without active duty military service."

This is not true. But that should have been obvious given the name of the poster. "Truth" is the guarantee of untruthfullness.

Military service certainly helps if you are white, but being black or hispanic provides a comparable advantage, even without military service.

Anonymous said...

People don't like public sector jobs because they actually DESTROY wealth rather than create it. How many countless thousands of people and jobs has the FDA killed? Or the EPA? Like the EEOC and the TSA, all these agencies that are supposed to "protect us" have only one real priority, and that is increasing their budget and turf. Read foseti.wordpress.com, a real USG bureaucrat for the real deal.

Government officials have guns and survive by pointing those guns at the rest of us to take our money. Sure, that means "job security" for them. It's also why there should be very few such employees, and why their salaries should be at just enough to prevent any incentive for using their guns to solicit bribes.

Oh, and the reason everyone is talking about fedguv employees now is that Obama has vastly increased their number and their pay while everyone else has been hurting.

Regarding the bankers who got govt handouts, their banks should of course all have been allowed to go belly up. But no fedguv agent can say that, because that would mean endangering the rationale for the SEC and their beloved "FinReg".

Anonymous said...

Speaking of weird tropical diseases my doctor ordered a stool test as part of my routine physical. There's a new indignity.

Blood tests are simple and neat. A professional extracts your blood in a clean modern setting. But to check for parasites you have to obtain and mix your own feces at home and then rush them back to the lab within two hours. You soon find yourself driving like a mad man while screaming out the window, "Get out of the way - hot shit coming through". If you are late you have to do it all over again.

It's all in vain of course. The TV reality show about parasites The Monsters Within Me has a section where the doctor asks the patient where he had been and what he had been doing. It always turns out that poor schlub had been eating raw crabs on the shore of Lake Tanganyika or some such.

Real Americans don't have parasites, only benighted Peace Corps volunteers or tropical adventurers like Charles Darwin.

Albertosaurus

Anonymous said...

The recent State Dept audit of the Embassy to Malta urged the speedy hiring of an Equal Employment Opportunity Officer.

There are only 122 non-military employees at this embassy. Must be a cushy gig for minorities.

David Davenport said...

If you want better salaries and pensions in the private sector then support unions ...

Are you a free trader?

What if American private sector industrial unions keep dwindling away because imported goods are cheaper? What do you propose to do about that?

Truth said...

Military service certainly helps if you are white, but being black or hispanic provides a comparable advantage, even without military service."

Again, grasshopper, you are making a comment on something you know nothing about. Federal jobs work on a point system, the number one gainer of points, by a country mile, is active duty, wartime military service.

As I've written before, I work in government contracting, I am black but work as a consultant, even though my supervisor says how much she would love to hire me every day, because I am not ex-military.

Instead, they continue to re-up my contract 60-90 days at a time (5 times now) because if they opened it up to the public, there is no way they would be able to hire me with a 10-15 active duty point deficit over an ex- soldier with ANYWHERE NEAR my experience.

Please son, leave your mom's basement and talk to a few people before making a fool of yourself.

Anonymous said...

David Davenport:
"Are you a free trader? What if American private sector industrial unions keep dwindling away because imported goods are cheaper? What do you propose to do about that?"

It's funny that Canada and Germany and many other countries face the same pressures from globalization but somehow manage to preserve their industrial bases and have much higher unionization rates.

By far and away the simplest method for reducing the trade deficit is to end the Wall Street-backed strong dollar policy started under Robert Rubin. A dollar overvalued by 15% is exactly the same as subsidizing imports by 15% and placing a 15% tariff on our own exports.

Mr. Anon said...

"Truth said...

As I've written before, I work in government contracting, I am black but work as a consultant, even though my supervisor says how much she would love to hire me every day, because I am not ex-military."

None-the-less, you are full of shit, as usual, a**hole (my term for "grasshopper"). Don't worry - we don't hold that against you - as a J-school grad you are not expected to know any facts or actually recognize one if you see one.

Government contracting below a certain dollar amount goes to minority owned companies (even if they are owned by pakistanis or indians, which they often are) - white men need not apply. Plenty of white men work for those companies, but they don't own them. And I know something about it as I happen to work for the federal government. Moreover, the unit I work for was told last summer that we would get (roughly) 30 new civil-service hiring slots, but that they must go to blacks or hispanics. If we tried to hire a white for the position, we would lose the slot.

Anonymous said...

The dispute between Mr. Anon and Truth is interesting.

Mr. Anon appears to be a White man suffering from federal discrimination against Whites, whereas Truth seems to be a Black man suffering from federal discrimination against non-vets.

I'm confident that both are indeed hurting and I sympathize - at least a little. But my compassion is tempered somewhat by the realization that they should have understood all this this before they allowed themselves to be subject to the whims of federal hiring practices.

If you found yourself a Spanish monk in the 15th century you should have known that you would have to watch what you said. Speak freely and burn.

Eventually the Inquisition dissolved and eventually the current federal affirmative action hysteria will likewise dissipate, but for mortal creatures like us who are bound to just one time, you need to avoid troublesome areas - like federal employment.

There may not be justice but at least there's irony. When the Labor Department in the Reagan days underwent Reductions in Force (RIFs) many of the women who had gotten their professional level jobs through quota policies, lost them because retention preferences were given to vets, especially disabled vets. These women went back to being a secretary instead of having a secretary. They were very, very bitter. But they had chosen a career path in which they competed not on merit but on personal characteristics and then one day there was a change in fashion. Poor babies.

Albertosaurus

Auto Da Fe said...

Albertosaurus

If you found yourself a Spanish monk in the 15th century you should have known that you would have to watch what you said. Speak freely and burn.

Eventually the Inquisition dissolved and eventually the current federal affirmative action hysteria will likewise dissipate, but for mortal creatures like us who are bound to just one time, you need to avoid troublesome areas - like federal employment.


Regular commentators on this board should realize by now that the "Spanish Inquisition" is largely anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic revisionist propaganda.

Modern studies of the actual documents of the Spanish Inquisition show that it was no more cruel and bloodthirsty than other legal systems of the time.[11] The popular image of moats, chains, and cries from rooms of torture are imagined exaggerations told by Protestant propagandists who had no first hand information or relied on a few individuals from Spain who had personal religious or political interests to serve by such stories.[12] Torture was used but no worse than in other jurisdictions of the time.[13] Legally, the inquisition only had jurisdiction over Catholics. Thus, a person who had been baptized into the Catholic faith but was found to be secretly practicing Jewish or Muslim customs was considered to be a Catholic culpable of heresy - and punishable under the law. Like similar European policies before and after the fifteenth century, the Alhambra Decree ordered Jews to convert or leave Spain in 1492. In 1502 Muslims were also required to convert or leave. A decree in 1615 expelled the Moriscos.

Mr. Anon said...

"Anonymous said...

The dispute between Mr. Anon and Truth is interesting.

Mr. Anon appears to be a White man suffering from federal discrimination against Whites, whereas Truth seems to be a Black man suffering from federal discrimination against non-vets."

Albertosaurus"

I have not suffered from it myself. I have observed it and I disapprove of it.

Truth said...

"Mr. Anon appears to be a White man suffering from federal discrimination against Whites, whereas Truth seems to be a Black man suffering from federal discrimination against non-vets."

Thank you for your concern.

Grasshopper apparently has a government job, so it can't be that unfair, and I was originally hired for a 6-month stint which has now been extended to 18, so I consider myself lucky.

I have no real problem with a military preference, I'm just saying that it exists. Four years running around with an M-16 has to be worth something.

Mr. Anon said...

"Truth said...

Grasshopper apparently has a government job, so it can't be that unfair, and I was originally hired for a 6-month stint which has now been extended to 18, so I consider myself lucky."

Yeah, asshole, it was still possible for a white guy with a Ph.D. to get a government job ten years ago - I have that one data point.

And everyone here should ponder the fact that your federal government is spending your tax dollars to hire the likes of "Truth". Undoubtedly for his incomparable cognitive powers.

Top Men.

Truth said...

You have a P.H.D alright;

Playa Hatin' Degree.