海角大神

We鈥檙e moving ever closer to a double-dip. Of course, as I鈥檝e said before, most Americans never got out of the first one.

In previous postings I鈥檝e suggested ways to reverse course, including a 鈥�people鈥檚 tax cut鈥� exempting the first $20K of income from payroll taxes and making up the revenue loss with a payroll tax on incomes over $250,000.

Yet Democrats seem frozen in the headlights of conservative supply-siders, blue-dog deficit hawks, and pollsters who say the public doesn鈥檛 trust anything government does.

As to Republicans, now comes John Boehner, capitalizing on this distrust by blaming the bad economy on government bureaucrats.

In an address billed as a major speech on economic policy, the House GOP leader yesterday (Tuesday) attributed our economic woes to the fact that 鈥渢axpayers are subsidizing the fattened salaries and pensions of federal bureaucrats who are out there right now making it harder to create private sector jobs.鈥�

What?

It鈥檚 true workers at all levels of government now earn more than their private-sector counterparts. But that鈥檚 mainly because private-sector benefits have dropped precipitously over the last few years. Companies have replaced defined-benefit pensions with do-it-yourself 401(k)s, and have ratcheted up premiums, co-payments, and deductibles on employee health-care. Government workers鈥� benefits haven鈥檛 yet been sliced the diced these ways, but the cuts are coming.

The pay gap is also due to the fact that the typical public-sector job requires more education. According to the Center for State and Local Government Excellence, 48 percent of state and local employees have a college degree while only 23 percent of private-sector employees do.

Blaming government workers for this bad economy is absurd, regardless. The Great Recession continues because consumers can鈥檛 and won鈥檛 spend. They鈥檙e overwhelmed with credit-card debt, their mortgages are under water, their nest eggs have become chick peas, and they can鈥檛 afford health insurance.

Rather than help alleviate all this, Boehner and his Republican colleagues have been busily voting against extending unemployment insurance, against reorganizing mortgages under bankruptcy, against forcing credit card companies to stop charging exorbitant interest, and against giving Americans affordable health insurance.

As far as I can tell, all Republican want to do is to privatize Social Security, extend the Bush tax cuts to the richest 3 percent of Americans, and deregulate. But none of this seems particularly relevant to the task at hand.

Privatizing Social Security would put retirees entirely at the mercy of the Wall Street casino.

Extending the Bush tax cuts to the richest 3 percent wouldn鈥檛 stimulate demand because the very rich save rather than spend most of their extra cash.

And if anything we need more rather than less regulation. Just consider BP鈥檚 oil spill, Massey鈥檚 mine cave-in, DeCoster鈥檚 rotten eggs, Goldman Sach鈥檚 predations, and Wellpoint鈥檚 double-digit insurance premium increases.

Boehner delivered his speech at the City Club of Cleveland, a safe distance from those government employees he says are on the make. But of course Boehner is a federal employee. He gets $193,400 a year along with generous retirement benefits. In fact, he has among the fattest salaries and pensions in Washington.

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