ILLINOIS - Remember the Obama days, when the great and illustrious O was so proud of all them thur jobs he was making...?
Yeah, we don't, either.
Obama's goal was to grow government, and at least in Illinois, that's exactly what happened. Instead of "shovel-ready jobs" that were supposed to both fix our infrastructure and provide lots of prevailing wage employment, he instead created boondoggle after boondoggle that not only didn't employ the hordes, but instead created more bureaucracy and that involved...you guessed it...more government employees to sort out the bureaucracy.
This, of course, gave state and federal employees even more impetus to believe that they were above the rest of us peons, and that their "jobs" were oh-so-important. They were...to them. To the rest of us who work hard daily to fund the government employees, however, we see the waste, abuse and yes, fraud, coming out of these government money holes.
Let's look at something. What do you make? No, not in terms of dollars. I mean, what do you produce? I know what I produce: I produce a website that delivers news. We specialize in the kind of news that no other media outlet covers because someone's widdle feewings might get hurt, so we produce something of value, that someone wants to put forth money or at least time and effort to "consume." You might work at a grocery store; you produce full racks or cases of groceries (even though those items you're stocking are produced in other locales, they wouldn't be available for people to purchase if you didn't put them out). You might work in the oil field; while you personally might not ever see any oil, your effort goes toward producing a fossil fuel that we all need. You might work at a production facility such as a steel mill, or an auto manufacturer, or a filter assembly. The end result of your work is, generally speaking, a thing. That thing has value; people want it, to possess or to consume, and so they put forth money for it. That's basic economics.
So what does a government employee produce...?
I'll wait while you think.
....
Whatcha got? Anything yet?
"But," a government employee might whine. "Without government, you wouldn't be able to get things done!! You couldn't get your driver's license! Or your property taxes calculated! Or ...or ...well, don't get me started on prison guards!! Yall wouldn't be SAYFFE without THEYUM!"
Well, we would if there weren't so many people being sent to prison for the most ridiculous things...or kept there for ridiculously-long periods of time while the laws change (think decriminalization of marijuana). Which kind of illustrates the point: Reduce the laws, reduce the layers of government, reduce all of it....and the likelihood that society will, in time, right itself, is a good one.
Bottom line: Government doesn't produce anything. They provide services, but are ALL those services necessary? In the current climate, unfortunately a lot of them are. However, the current climate is a construct. Literally, it's government propping up government by making more statutes, more rules, more regulations, thus more need for those to be serviced and enforced. And that is NOT what a Constitutional Republic - which is what we are, NOT a "democracy" - was designed to be.
Hence the headline of this piece, taken from this article at Illinois News Network. Here's a snip:
Government jobs in Illinois outpaced manufacturing jobs in the most recent jobs report from the Illinois Department of Employment Security. Government jobs grew more than 14,800 over 12 months. Manufacturing grew by 12,800.
Wirepoints founder Mark Glennon said the growth of manufacturing jobs is good, but even those gains were outpaced by government hiring.
“This imbalance between the growth rates is not healthy,” Glennon said. “If government is growing faster than the private sector, we’ve got a problem.”
He said Illinois’ growth in manufacturing coincides with President Donald Trump's economic policies designed to improve the country’s manufacturing sector, but in Illinois, the growth of government jobs still outpaces manufacturing growth.
IDES said most of the new government jobs over the past 12 months, most were from local governments. There were 1,400 new state government jobs, but 1,100 fewer federal government jobs.
So O is gone, but his policies of taxing us working people to death in order to prop up big government lives on in Illinois. Nauseating. And sadly...people don't get it. We working-class slobs are propping up both the government employees at the top, and the welfare recipients at the bottom, both of which invariably vote blue in order to keep the tax dollars - OUR tax dollars - flowing to them. And that's not right. So remember that when you get an opportunity to vacate the state - take it. Get. Out. Go someplace where your tax dollars will go to something helpful instead of in pockets and shoeboxes and deep-freezes and who know where else the shysters keep it.