In his RealClearMarkets blog today, Manhattan Institute fellow Josh Barro suggests it is time to freeze public employee pay.  He makes a very good case: 

“Since the end of 2006, hourly total compensation (wages plus benefits) has risen 6.5% for private sector workers, essentially keeping pace with inflation. But state and local government workers saw their hourly compensation rise 9.2%.

“Federal civilian workers (about 10% of the public sector civilian workforce). . .did even better, receiving Congressionally-approved wage rises totaling 9.9% over the same period.”
 

But employee pay is only half the story.  The number of public-sector employees is way out of whack regardless of their level of pay.  The New York Times reported in August that:

 “‘While the private sector has shed 6.9 million jobs since the beginning of the recession, state and local governments have expanded their payrolls and added 110,000 jobs.”
 

A September 3, 2009 Washington Post article (“Federal Government Needs Massive Hiring Binge, Study Finds”) exposed this same parasitic behavior at the federal level.  According to the study, the federal government “needs to hire” more than 270,000 workers for "mission-critical" jobs over the next three years.  Obscene.

Two states illustrate what is happening all over the country.  In Virginia, for example, I wrote in September before Republican Bob McDonnell won the governor’s race:

“A wealth of research indicates that government at all levels is at least 25 percent bigger than it should be during the best economic times.  By that standard, Governor Kaine should have laid off at least 25,500 public employees in Virginia before the recession hit.  With a recession reducing the private economy and reducing the amount that can be extracted in taxes, he should be laying off at least another 10 percent of the state workforce (10,000 state employees).”
 

Yet, there was no indication in his inaugural address that Virginia’s new governor is going to rectify this situation.

In a November blog, I pointed out that since 2002, the number of full-time workers employed by the state of New Jersey in the executive branch has increased by 24 percent—from 67,213 in 2002 to 83,400 today—17 times faster than the 1.4-percent growth of New Jersey’s population during the same period.

Despite the grand rhetoric of conservative politicians about limiting government growth, reducing taxes and removing stifling regulations on business, the government leech just gets fatter.  It goes on and on:  Taxpayers at all levels of government are paying too many taxes to pay too many government bureaucrats too much money.  The parasitic state is sucking America dry.