The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
News of the Tautological
“Police Seek Wanted Man”–headline, Wausau (Wis.) Daily Herald, Dec. 3
‘A Major Setback for Football’
“US President Barack Obama said FIFA made the ‘wrong decision’ on Thursday when selecting Qatar over an American bid to host the 2022 World Cup in what will be a major setback for football in America,” reports Agence France-Presse.
The good news is that America will get the Super Bowl. But the president has a point: Bringing the World Cup to America would surely be good for football in that it would remind us all how superior it is to soccer.
The Not So Big Chill
President Obama began the week by calling for a “pay freeze” for federal employees. Vincent Vernuccio of the Competitive Enterprise Institute argues that while the proposal “is a small step towards curbing government spending,” it’s mostly a gimmick:
The freeze will not affect pay raises for job classification upgrades. As an official at the Office of Management and Budget told Federal News Radio, “employees will still be eligible for step increases.”
Step promotions–also known as “within-grade increases”–are mandated by statute. They are nearly automatic as long as an employee performs his job adequately. The law governing federal employee pay states, “a within-grade increase shall be effective on the first day of the first pay period following completion of the required waiting period and in compliance with the conditions of eligibility.”
Here’s how the system works. Over 70 percent of the federal workforce (except for the military and postal workers) is paid according to the Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) General Schedule (GS) pay scale. GS includes 15 wage grades that reflect the category and skill necessary to perform a job, with 10 steps within each grade.
According to OPM, new employees can expect to receive a step increase every year, mid-level employees every two years, and senior employees every three years. Step increases can range from $728.00 for a GS 3 to $3,321.00 for a GS 15.
Sounds pretty generous for a “freeze”! Yet it’s still too [small] for former Enron adviser [and NY Times columnist] Paul Krugman:
The truth is that America’s long-run deficit problem has nothing at all to do with overpaid federal workers. For one thing, those workers aren’t overpaid. Federal salaries are, on average, somewhat less than those of private-sector workers with equivalent qualifications. And, anyway, employee pay is only a small fraction of federal expenses; even cutting the payroll in half would reduce total spending less than 3 percent.
So freezing federal pay is cynical deficit-reduction theater. It’s a (literally) cheap trick that only sounds impressive to people who don’t know anything about budget realities. The actual savings, about $5 billion over two years, are chump change given the scale of the deficit.
Anyway, slashing federal spending at a time when the economy is depressed is exactly the wrong thing to do.
Note how Krugman attempts to lead the reader down the garden path. He seems to be arguing, like Vernuccio, that the problem with the so-called freeze is that it doesn’t cut enough. Then he turns around and asserts that any cut in federal spending is too much. (He goes on to claim that the right thing to do is raise taxes during a recession.)
There is a very good reason to freeze federal pay, or at least allow it to cool somewhat, even if such an action is far from sufficient to deal with the deficit-and-debt problem. Americans who work in the voluntary sector,–those who’ve been fortunate enough to keep their jobs–have seen real freezes and even cuts, in wages and benefits over the past few years. People who work for the government–for us–should not be immune from such hardship.
To treat government workers as a privileged class, which is effectively what Krugman urges, is to abandon all hope of controlling the expansion of government, which to Krugman is an ideological goal, not a drawback. Yet such an approach promises only to breed more distrust of and anger at government. Contemporary left-liberalism is politically as well as economically unsustainable.
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.”
