Hyprocrisy

My brother-in-law is a New York City employee looking forward to his 50th birthday next year. Why do you ask is he looking forward to hitting the half century mark? Because, as a union employee who will have worked for the city over 30 years by then (he started in the good old days of the early 1980s when you could still make a good living without a college degree), he will be able to retire on a full pension and sit at home for the next 17-20 years while the rest of us continue to toil. Good for him. However, I am amazed at his attitude regarding taxes and biting the government hands that feed him.

He recently posted the greatest layoff letter ever on his Facebook page. To summarize, it was a layoff notice by an "employer" stating he had to fire staff due to the increased cost of ObamaCare and he reduced staff by laying off the owners of every car in the parking lot with a pro-Obama bumper sticker. My brother-in-law approved that letter, saying how we need lower taxes. I remarked how ironic it was that a government employee, living high on the government teet, would feel that way, noting that less taxes in general would mean less money for government employees, even those with tenure and not too far from retirement .

He responded that less spending requires less money, and less money means less taxes. He feels that if we cut spending, and cut the civil service workforce, which he noted would directly affect him in a negative manner but it IS the right thing to do. Fair enough, but then the conversation shifted over to government waste, noting that three qualified well paid employees could EASILY do the job of ten current employees in his department. Again, I'll take him at his word from this. I've dealt with enough antiquated union rules to not doubt this is true. In many instances I feel the rules are there to just add payroll (and union dues) regardless whether those jobs are needed or those rules are still necessary. However, I'm not talking about -- I am talking about hyprocisy.

Now, acknowledging that if I still lived in New York I, as a tax payer, I would be awfully annoyed I would be giving somebody money every year to someone starting at age 50 (basically our prime earning years) to NOT work, one who I might add could easily work another 15 to 20 years,  while cutting money to pay a teacher to teach over paying someone who  to stay home (ignoring I live in a state where a retired state employee can get a new state job and still get a pension), I questioned what does the waste of Civil Service protection keeping seven extra employees employed have to do with shifting the burden of uninsured patients from the taxpayers who fund ERs (law says hospitals have to treat regardless of ability to pay) to employers who don't offer health insurance?  

Pointing out our conversation had drifted to lowed taxes, he responded that creating a workforce that would be 30% the size but more efficient... saving taxes. He used the example that Walmart pays a certain wage and benefit package and people take the job.. nobody is being dragged into the stores and made to fill out the applications but after weeks they all complain (jobs are scarce, etc. supply/demand). Of course what he failed to acknowledge was: 1) Walmart has been cutting their workforce too, leaving many stores under serviced with customers unable to take their business elsewhere as Walmart has become a defacto monopoly in many areas and 2) that in states where Walmart is the largest employer, Walmart employees are the states' largest number of recipients of federal subsidized Medicaid and Food Stamps due to wages and arbitrary scheduling that make it impossible for those employees to currently afford health insurance. That is tax dollars paid by all of us to subsidize Walmart's business practices I don't think that the Walmart daughters coughing up a few dollars (for them) to cover their share will bankrupt them, do you?

At this point I remembered I was arguing with someone who had drank the Fox Kool-Aide (I already knew I was the "liberal" in my family) as he shifted the argument to how much he pays in taxes, that they are too high, noting that at one time his goal was to earn what he now pays in taxes. Faulty logic. His first mistake was noting what he pays in dollars, not what he pays as a percentage of of his income. If you think the federal tax rate is high now, I told him, look at what the rates were when our fathers were our ages. If you run the actual dollar numbers (referring to your goal from decades ago was to earn what you now pay in taxes) through an inflation calendar you would discover what we pay (ignoring we live in Nassau and NJ, the land of high property taxes) is not as bad as you think, I reminded him. 

He then opinionated that if only the Walmart workers had a higher moral compass they wouldn't need assistance, pointing out that the starting salary for a NYPD officer, falls well below the limits for WIC, earned income credit and SNAP, implying that officers/cadets who take take full advantage of these benefits have a poor compass because they don't pay those benefits back when they finally make enough money to not need the extra assistance. I reminded him that those cadets aren't taking "advantage" by taking WIC etc, they take it because they don't earn enough otherwise to, I don't know, eat? and that I pay taxes for welfare, food stamps, unemployment etc as insurance so that the benefits will be there if I need that. Being poor has nothing to do with a moral compass. 

On the other hand paying wages too low to live on does. In that case, the city is just as bad as Walmart using my federal tax dollars to subsidize the cadets. There's something wrong when someone working a full time job can barely support themselves. And, though I didn't point this out as I really didn't want to start WW3 in my family, one could argue that all the benefits he received from the city via his union could be equated with the welfare benefits the low paid cadets receive and that the low paid cadets repaid the benefits they received when paying taxes on their eventual higher salaries, something the Walmart workers probably will never be able to do. Not that heirs of Sam Walton seem to care. What do they know about meritocracy and receiving rewards for good work? Their financial success was guaranteed as soon as they received their inheritances (God forbid we put an inheritance tax in place to prevent an aristocracy from forming but that is another blog post).

I remember when my goal was to make $10 an hour, of course that was in 1985 when I was making $3.75 an hour (a bit above the then minimum wage) and was just finishing high school. Times change, and so do our expectations. I found the census for 1940 and saw what my grandfather, a bank executive, made that year. After running it through an inflation calculator I saw how low his salary was -- which explains in part why they lived in a 4th floor walkup in Brooklyn without a car. We pay more dollars because we make more dollars and I like having a house, phone, multiple cars and other items my grandparents would have considered a luxury. 

He then complained that he knows a lot of people, himself included, who opted for lower wages (much lower than comparable private sector positions) to gain benefits. His argument was that if benefits are given out to everyone, then pay will be the only deciding factor and companies can then use public sector wages as a standard instead of the other way around (NYC civil service law has provisions that an in-house title CANNOT pay more than 80% of private sector.. and they include benefit packages which are usually considered as 30 - 40% of total wages). As an example, he pointed to city electricians using a section of the law to gain equity with private sector wages because of the huge disparity... jump forward 8 years, they received a 77% wage increase but lost 23 annual days and pay their own medical ... overall they gained about 15% in salary but if they should get sick for an extended period that gain would be gone in a flash.... making choices. Well, gee. Welcome to the private sector.  

Basically, he was  arguing that Unions got too greedy. I agree to an extent. Certain work rules regarding job titles and duties that may have made sense in 1953 don't make sense in 2013. On the other hand, Walmart's low wages make the argument for unions; imagine if the union fervor of the early 20th century existed today. Even though Walmart is low skill, they would be pretty screwed if everyone struck at once. For them its all about money not the customers or employees and if they saw their bottom line was being affected they might react with higher wages or more employees. Unfortunately, in many places in this country the customers don't have the option of striking Walmart so the money will keep rolling in.

Going back to the waste, there is a lot of blame to go around for that but basically, like the debt, we are living through the consequences of labor/ social peace of 50-60 years ago where all parties kicked the problem down the road. Nobody cared about needed reforms. The result is that in the last decade or so government pay and benefits has exceeded the private sector. My wife, who works in the NJ court system, can point to many lawyers applying for what used to be high school diploma jobs in the court because the money is better than the private sector and I know that can not last, especially now that we are in a global economic market. But that is another argument

My other grandfather was a NYC school principal in the 1950s and 60s, retiring just after the teachers' unions "won." He was telling me in the mid 80s that while he understood the necessity of the teachers unions to curb the principals' powers that the pendulum had already swung too far left. Add on another 30 years, along with previous tax cuts, and here we are, the public sector being a superior place to work over the private sector for many at the same time you have people like my brother-in-law, a man who has done well on the government payroll, arguing to cut the ladder behind him now that he has gotten his. Complete hypocrisy.

I am not saying I like ObamaCare (I feel it is a big windfall for private insurance companies), and I can see his point about making choices, but I don't see why a union employee is upset over someone in the private sector having to offer a 10th of what his union has given him. I think it is marvelous that he gets great health benefits. I think it is hypocritical of him to say that no one else should have them because NOW he wants taxes and spending to be cut. If he put his actions where his mouth was, he would be working until 70 like the rest of us (which he will of course, he will be able to make much more money in the private sector with the engineering skills he learned from the city, even without a college degree).

Wealth inequality is as high as the years before the Great Depression. That only ended when we taxed ourselves like nuts for WW2 and then to build the post-war infrastructure that made us the most powerful nation in the world and whose legacy we are barely holding onto as we starve our schools, roads, power lines etc. of needed capital. Yes, the tax rates of the mid 20th century were insanely high, but they have been cut many times they hit their peak. Tax rates today are low, enough with the idea that a few cents or dollars more for Obamacare will destroy the country. 

Finally, happy minus 50 years to first contact with the Vulcans on a ship paid for by tax dollars but re-purposed by a private scientist.