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发帖数: 29846 | 1 政府膨胀：1960年，1,500万美国人在制造业工作，870万在政府部门工作；2011年，2,
250在政府部门工作，1,150万在制造业工作
By STEPHEN MOORE
If you want to understand better why so many states—from New York to
Wisconsin to California—are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider
this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many
people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of
manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the
situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8
.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.
It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in
construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and
utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a
nation of takers. Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local
governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and
local employees. Is it any wonder that so many states and cities cannot pay
their bills?
Every state in America today except for two—Indiana and Wisconsin—has more
government workers on the payroll than people manufacturing industrial
goods. Consider California, which has the highest budget deficit in the
history of the states. The not-so Golden State now has an incredible 2.4
million government employees—twice as many as people at work in
manufacturing. New Jersey has just under two-and-a-half as many government
employees as manufacturers. Florida's ratio is more than 3 to 1. So is New
York's.
Even Michigan, at one time the auto capital of the world, and Pennsylvania,
once the steel capital, have more government bureaucrats than people making
things. The leaders in government hiring are Wyoming and New Mexico, which
have hired more than six government workers for every manufacturing worker.
Now it is certainly true that many states have not typically been home to
traditional manufacturing operations. Iowa and Nebraska are farm states, for
example. But in those states, there are at least five times more government
workers than farmers. West Virginia is the mining capital of the world, yet
it has at least three times more government workers than miners. New York
is the financial capital of the world—at least for now. That sector employs
roughly 670,000 New Yorkers. That's less than half of the state's 1.48
million government employees.
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Don't expect a reversal of this trend anytime soon. Surveys of college
graduates are finding that more and more of our top minds want to work for
the government. Why? Because in recent years only government agencies have
been hiring, and because the offer of near lifetime security is highly
valued in these times of economic turbulence. When 23-year-olds aren't
willing to take career risks, we have a real problem on our hands. Sadly, we
could end up with a generation of Americans who want to work at the
Department of Motor Vehicles.
The employment trends described here are explained in part by hugely
beneficial productivity improvements in such traditional industries as
farming, manufacturing, financial services and telecommunications. These
produce far more output per worker than in the past. The typical farmer, for
example, is today at least three times more productive than in 1950.
Where are the productivity gains in government? Consider a core function of
state and local governments: schools. Over the period 1970-2005, school
spending per pupil, adjusted for inflation, doubled, while standardized
achievement test scores were flat. Over roughly that same time period,
public-school employment doubled per student, according to a study by
researchers at the University of Washington. That is what economists call
negative productivity.
But education is an industry where we measure performance backwards: We
gauge school performance not by outputs, but by inputs. If quality falls, we
say we didn't pay teachers enough or we need smaller class sizes or newer
schools. If education had undergone the same productivity revolution that
manufacturing has, we would have half as many educators, smaller school
budgets, and higher graduation rates and test scores.
The same is true of almost all other government services. Mass transit
spends more and more every year and yet a much smaller share of Americans
use trains and buses today than in past decades. One way that private
companies spur productivity is by firing underperforming employees and
rewarding excellence. In government employment, tenure for teachers and near
lifetime employment for other civil servants shields workers from this
basic system of reward and punishment. It is a system that breeds mediocrity
, which is what we've gotten.
Most reasonable steps to restrain public-sector employment costs are
smothered by the unions. Study after study has shown that states and cities
could shave 20% to 40% off the cost of many services—fire fighting, public
transportation, garbage collection, administrative functions, even prison
operations—through competitive contracting to private providers. But unions
have blocked many of those efforts. Public employees maintain that they are
underpaid relative to equally qualified private-sector workers, yet they
are deathly afraid of competitive bidding for government services.
President Obama says we have to retool our economy to "win the future." The
only way to do that is to grow the economy that makes things, not the sector
that takes things.
Mr. Moore is senior economics writer for The Wall Street Journal editorial
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