You're not reading my reply, Steve. I confessed to a mistake in which I read your 50% comment as covering all public employees. And I made the mistake because I skimmed your message quickly and replied on my way out the door to a meeting. My apologies.
As for the Krugman observation, it was a rather simple one, that laying off state and municipal employees as an austerity move when an economic recovery is as fragile as this one is to use the horrible language of bureaucracy, counter-productive.
I agree with that point.
I also want to make the point, and this is not a Krugman point, that in so far as I know anything about municipal budgets, government, education, libraries, and so on, they are cutting bone now, at least in New Jersey. It's services that are being cut. Whether those services are essential or not depends, unfortunately, on your point of view. Because the current perverse debate in Jersey is not over whether one could raise state level taxes on the wealthier and on corporations to at least slow the down the cuts. The debate is not about that. It rather pits service against service. Should we cut the school budget to find some more police or fire or save the library. And so on.
I submit when the debate reaches those levels you are cutting services, depleting the common core of what municipal communities are about. |
