I’ve always said that its easy to be charitable when you are rich and have all of your needs fulfilled. As the money runs out I expect a lot more people to sound like Mish who is already beyond political correctness and well into early rage. Bottom line is that there simply won’t be much sympathy for people who got used to getting massively overcompensated relative to their actual contribution to society.
Now, I know some people will take offense to that because we have been socially engineered to think about firefighters and policemen as “heroes”. The propaganda around that has been ridiculous over the years and I suspect it will come out some day that public unions were behind it with big spending in order to justify spiraling salaries, benefits and ridiculous pensions. To be fair, firemen and policemen do important jobs in society. But are they any more important to the proper function of things than any other job? I really don’t think so.
For example, in 50 years I have never needed the service of a fireman and I have never called the police to come protect me. It’s nice to know that they are there but they are more like insurance than some actual daily need. On the other hand, I have used the output of roofers, steel workers and many other types of low paid workers many times. To me they are more important than police and firemen.
Imagine if there were no roofers in the world. You and your family would have no protection from the rain or the sun or the heat or cold. Millions of people would die each year from heavy weather without roofers keeping us safe! It would be very easy to build a lengthy argument as to why roofers are “heroes” and thus deserving of incredible pay and benefits. But roofers don’t work for the government and thus they have no government employee’s union set up to extort money and benefits from taxpayers (who are complacent and thus to some extent deserve the fleecing we get). Because of this roofers are paid a modest wage relative to police and firemen.
OK, OK, but firemen and policemen put their lives on the line for us everyday and thus deserve a huge price premium, right? If you believe this then you are a victim of social engineering and union propaganda because the truth is that roofing (and many other mundane blue collar jobs) are actually more dangerous than being a fireman and garbage collection is more dangerous than being a policeman:
Why do we never hear the full facts? Because government is gaming us and it is not in their interest to tell us the truth. The truth is only coming out now because the credit used to fund all of this excess is running out. It is all part of the healing process even though it is being billed as a crisis. The laid off, able bodied, young fireman in the first link would do well for himself to stop begging and to go get a roofing or garbage collection job.
