Jack of Harts

I said before that there are around three million federal government workers. They were told over the weekend to reply to an e-mail saying five things they did the previous week and that failure to respond would be taken as a resignation. In reaction to being asked to show their work, they screamed and cried and protested the idea that they had to show their work. The response was to say that the e-mail is partially a test to see how many people actually read it and reply to it, because it is doubted that all three million actually exist. Approximately one million employees responded. Interestingly, one million is how many employees the federal government had a century ago. Going back to the size of the federal government of a century ago sounds like a good start to me. Then we can start looking at actually important cuts.

There are three million Americans employed by the United States government. That is approximately 1% of all Americans working for the government. Of those Americans who work, it is 2% work for the federal government. If you know 50 people who work, there is a good chance 1 of them works for the federal government. Obviously, that number will be higher in cities and lower in the country, but you get the idea.

This number is not sustainable for the long term. One reason is because government jobs do not create wealth. They leach off those who do, and if 1 in 50 makes its living by leaching off the hard work of 49, then each of those 49 have to pay a noticeable part of their income to supporting that 1 federal government worker. Especially since each 1 federal government worker usually makes more money than the average of the other 49. And this does not account for the number of those 49 who work for the State or Local governments, which changes of course based on State, County, or City. Another reason is that no government should feel it has sufficient numbers to oppress the citizens of the nation.

America is deeply in debt, and we continue to spend more than we generate via taxes on those who work and generate wealth. Increasing taxes will simply take money away from the productive classes of America. Punish them for being productive. The most sensible and easiest way to reduce our spending is to reduce the number of unproductive jobs. Those who leach off the productive classes. The government worker who generates no wealth. And if we can encourage them to find productive jobs outside the government that generate wealth, their taxes will go to paying the unproductive government jobs that remain, thereby reducing the average amount paid by all Americans to support them. This is good for everybody.

If we laid off or fired two million federal workers, the economic backbone of America would be greatly improved. I submit that we should look to that number as a decent starting points towards making American stronger. These are truly deep cuts, and they will be painful to those who are cut. They will have to find a job in the normal job market, working for a man or a woman who requires that they be productive in order to be paid. In many cases this will be painful for them to learn, but for the health of our nation, we must do something like this. If we do not, our debt burden will drag us down.

Saturday was my monthly (or so) DnD night. Well, Pathfinder, but you get the idea. We were respeccing all of our characters in a campaign and going from six characters to four characters. My cleric got a sudden conversion to the glories that is being an elemental fire sorceress and she went to town on a couple trolls and some other bad guys. And did NOT get to go fire while inside the dead and dried out tree a bunch of mitflits lived in. But she is an elemental so she’s got lightning and water and air as well. She basically IS magic, and can do a little bit of everything. Though she REALLY wants to burn things, because fire is fun.

And the miniature I’m using for her is painted by a friend and is amazingly beautiful. Complete with her throwing a magical ball of blue flame at the enemy… because she burns that hot. The fact that she was originally painted to be a cleric with soothing healing magic does not go into this at all.

In the end it was a fun time with friends slaying make believe enemies and smack talking each other. Because that’s what friends do. Get together in one room, eat good food, eat junk food, roll dice, smack talk each other when our dice run colder than a Minnesota winter, and cheer when they go hot as an Arizona summer. We backed out on a fight with a five-headed hydra because we didn’t think we were up for that heat. Then dropped a giant dire boar with rolls that made us think maybe we could have taken that hydra. Then flubbed our roles against a troll so bad we thought maybe avoiding the hydra was a good thing.

And if you don’t do DnD, that’s how it sounds to me when you talk about fantasy football.