Some very interesting charts in this piece from Charles Hugh Smith…
If we set aside ideological biases and seek financial common sense, we can see that the public sector costs are simply unsustainable.
I’m going to ask you to do something very difficult before reading further: please leave your ideological biases, certainties and emotions at the door, for the goal here is Financial Common Sense, something which is in desperately short supply in the “debate” over public employees and their unions, taxes and State budgets.
Let’s scrape away all the ideological baggage and just look at the numbers, shall we? If you must assign a point of view, then let’s take the POV of someone who is, broadly speaking, sympathetic to unions and wants to “do the right thing” but who is also a private sector worker who has seen his/her income and assets fall in the past three years even as inflation, official and otherwise, has further eroded the purchasing power of his/her stagnant income. As a result, paying higher taxes is a direct reduction in disposable income and thus a serious sacrifice.
There are about 106 million private sector wage earners and about 24 million public sector employees in the U.S. for a total of about 130 million jobs.
http://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html
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