New York Times: Wanting Smaller Government Is Kind Of Racist
We’ve got a $15 trillion national debt, and an annual budget deficit of well over $1 trillion annually, so you would think that the need to limit government is self-evident. But not only is not not self-evident to the folks at the New York Times, but they think the efforts to limit and shrink government are tinged with racism.
Their justification for such an insinuation? Well, I guess minorities are disproportionately represented in the ranks of government workers:
Buried in the relatively positive numbers contained in the November jobs report was some very bad news for those who work in the public sector. There were 20,000 government workers laid off last month, by far the largest drop for any sector of the economy, mostly from states, counties and cities.
That continues a troubling trend that’s been building for years, one that has had a particularly harsh effect on black workers. While the private sector has been adding jobs since the end of 2009, more than half a million government positions have been lost since the recession. …
Many Republicans, however, don’t regard government jobs as actual jobs, and are eager to see them disappear. Republican governors around the Midwest have aggressively tried to break the power of public unions while slashing their work forces, and Congressional Republicans have proposed paying for a payroll tax cut by reducing federal employment rolls by 10 percent through attrition. That’s 200,000 jobs, many of which would be filled by blacks and Hispanics and others who tend to vote Democratic, and thus are considered politically superfluous.
So, you see, limiting government is bad for the economy and bad for minorities because it would cost both jobs. Of course, what does go into the Times’ analysis is the fact that the tax dollars (or the deficit spending as the case may be) which fund these government jobs costs the economy as well, and dearly.
But suppose the Times is right. Suppose that all these government jobs were good for the economy. Should we then hire up all of the nation’s unemployed and put them on the government payroll?
That’s actually kind of what the stimulus spending (which the Times supported fervently) was all about. Saving and/or creating government jobs.
Whether the government spends tax dollars taken from taxpayers on government jobs, or finances them through printing money (which makes us all poorer by devaluing our wealth), it’s not a stimulus.
Tags: media bias, new york times, Stimulus
