Washington’s Cradle to Grave Jobs Program
July 27th, 2011
Your tax dollars at work
Usually when someone brings up the phrase “cradle-to-grave” it’s usually in relation to a government’s welfare state policies. Thankfully, such a government doesn’t exist in the United States (not yet, anyway), but there is still a cradle-to-grave strategy going on, and all you need to do is get hired by them, and pretend that you’re doing something.
In a report from USA Today, four government agencies, the EPA, Small Business Administration, HUD, and the OMB, have reported that more employees died last year than were fired. According to last year’s budget analysis, the Federal Government, which has a workforce of 2.1 million employees, fired only 0.55% of them for misconduct or for poor job performance (that’s about 11,668 employees). In the Small Business Administration, more people left their jobs because of death (17), than were actually laid off (0).
To put these numbers in perspective, over 3% of employees in the private sector were fired last year, that’s six times the firing rate of government jobs. Also, unlike the private sector, government jobs are constantly being added, which in turn will grow the size of government and put an even bigger burden on the American taxpayer.
On the plus side, if you’re thinking about getting a job in Washington, you’ve got an almost 99% chance of not getting canned, so you can play that extra round of FreeCell on your computer, and not be worried that your boss will fire you over it.
