Pity The Poor Government Worker, Says The NY Times
- JOHN MERLINE
- 4/26/2018
The "Newspaper of Record" ran a big story this week that valiantly tried to show how state and local government workers have it so very tough these days.
The 2,240-word front-page story in The New York Times begins by lamenting that, while government jobs used to provide "a comfortable nook in the middle class," those days are gone.
"The ranks of state and local employees have languished even as the populations they serve have grown," the article says. "The 19.5 million workers who remain are finding themselves financially downgraded."
The article goes on to quote Neil Reichenberg, executive director of the International Public Management Association for Human Resources, who says that "it's a tough time to be working in government."
The Times focuses, not surprisingly, on a Republican state — Oklahoma — which it describes as "one of several Republican-led states where persistent anti-tax sentiment and severe budget cuts have guided policymaking."
But in their zeal to tell this story, the Times reporters had to ignore some relevant facts that more or less completely undercut it.
For one thing, while it's true that state and local jobs have been growing more slowly than the private sector in the past eight years, there's no relationship between Republican or Democratic states and those growth rates
In fact, the very state the Times reporters focus on — Oklahoma — saw the number of state and local jobs increase by 1,400 since 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In low-tax Texas, state and local jobs went up 71,900 over those years.
What about The New York Times' own home state? High-tax, solidly blue New York shed more than 53,000 state and local government jobs over the past eight years. Deep blue Illinois cut 12,000. None of these facts was in the Times' story.
Bad Management
Nor does the Times explain that a big reason many state governments are strapped for cash these days isn't because of tax cuts, but because of gross mismanagement by government leaders who've squandered taxpayer money.
As we've noted in this space, the worst fiscally managed states in the country are almost all heavily Democratic, which also tend to impose far higher tax burdens on their residents and are losing population.
It also fails to mention the rapid growth of Medicaid, especially among those states that expanded the program under ObamaCare. Despite getting generous matching funds from the federal government, Medicaid is rapidly swamping state budgets, forcing them to trim costs elsewhere.
But what's really odd about the Time story is that it tries to portray government workers as being financially strapped, when they typically get paid far more than their private sector counterparts. At least, that's what several studies have found.
Higher Pay
The American Enterprise Institute, for example, conducted a thorough state-by-state analysis of similarly educated and experienced workers in 2014. It found that when you combine wages and benefits, government workers got as much as 42% more than their private sector counterparts, depending on the state. In Oklahoma, the pay gap was 7% in favor of state workers.
A 2015 study by the Yankee Institute found that Connecticut state workers make 25% to 46% more in pay and benefits than comparable private sector employees.
Another found that while wages were comparable, "the average state and local government job paid benefits that were 117% higher than the average private sector job."
Bureau of Labor Statistics data for December 2017 show that state and local "sales and office" workers get 35% more in hourly wages and benefits than do private sector workers in this category.
Lower Productivity
And these measures don't include the value of job security, which government workers have in abundance. Private sector workers, not so much.
Nor do they include measures of productivity. (State and local workers tend to put in fewer hours than workers in the private sector.)
Yet the only pay-gap study the Times cites in its lengthy piece was done by an Oklahoma state government office. It concluded, not surprisingly, that state workers there make 24% less than they could in the private sector.
The Times apparently wants its readers to believe that tax-cutting Republicans are starving valued public servants. It would be a sad story, if true. But the facts say otherwise.
Too bad for Times' readers that those facts weren't fit to print.
https://www.investors.com/politics/c...ew-york-times/