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 â€?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.”
