Political class to taxpayers: you work for us
You work for us. Do the government employees serve the taxpayers, or are the taxpayers here to provide them with salaries and benefits?
If you’re a government worker, most of whom are part of the political class that we’ve written of before, the answer is obvious. It doesn’t matter how stretched taxpayers are, the cost of government (that’s what bureaucrats’ salaries and benefits are, after all) must not decrease.
The clever members of the political class couch their objections to cutting government spending in terms with which we all sympathize. See this wonderful article explaining Detroit’s current fiscal/government situation for an example of this:
“This guy is just full of it,” Leamon Wilson, chairman of the presidents [sic] of AFSCME’s locals, said about Bing. “He’s not trying to work with us. He doesn’t seem to have any respect for the workers and what they do.”
In other words, a mayor who doesn’t seek to curry favor with the bureaucrats as his top priority, and whose administration asks questions of department heads such as
What services do you provide now? What services should you provide? How much will it cost? Is there a way to do it cheaper? Can another entity do it cheaper?
is, in this government-employee-union leader’s view, anti-worker (whatever that’s supposed to mean). The RLC-MI surely isn’t the only group around that finds objections like the AFSCME leader’s ridiculous (no matter how much he mischaracterizes the debate as being about “respect for workers”). And the Bing administration’s questions, if they actually lead to right-sizing city government, show just differently Mayor Bing thinks from the political class.
Would that more GOP leaders follow Mayor Bing’s lead, and ask department heads to justify their departments’ existence as publicly funded entities.