“Workers across the country responded with anger and confusion,” the Associated Press reported last week, in response to the Trump administration’s layoffs of probationary workers. CBS News tells us “federal workers express shock, anger over mass firings,” and The New York Times writes that federal works face “sleeplessness, anger and tears.”
Some workers launched lawsuits against the Trump administration. Others went on legacy media television shows to claim they have been mistreated.
The media interviews, lawsuits, protests, and open letters all hit on a similar theme: that it is wrong and unfair that taxpayer-funded government workers might have to look for work in the marketplace like ordinary people. Regular workers, after all—the type without federal jobs from which, historically, it is virtually impossible to be fired—often have to change jobs whenever there is a restructuring, merger, bankruptcy, or budget cut. This is life outside the comfortable fantasy world of federal employment. Naturally, federal employees don’t like the sound of that at all.
The legacy media has portrayed this all as a conflict between the hard-working, guileless folk of the federal workforce on the one hand, and the insensitive villains of the Trump administration on the other. There is a third party to all of this that is virtually never mentioned by the media, though: the taxpayers who pay for it all.
The Forgotten Third Party: The Taxpayers
After all, the federal employees’ salaries only exist because money is transferred—by force—from taxpayers to federal employees. If a taxpayer doesn’t want to pay for USAID’s countless leftwing propaganda programs across the globe, then he has no choice. He has to pay up or go to jail for tax evasion.
Thus, any discussion of federal employees that doesn’t mention the taxpayers who pay bureaucrats’ salaries is fundamentally dishonest and incomplete. Donald Trump isn’t paying for these jobs. American fast-food workers, insurance agents, and cell-phone salespeople are paying for it all.
Indeed, in America, there are more than ten million jobs funded by federal taxes, including direct-hire federal employees, contractors, and grantees. These jobs are paid for by about 131 million private-sector workers. That’s one federal worker for every 13 private workers. Given that taxes on income are the primary source of federal revenue, each federal worker owes nearly everything to the 13 workers who pay for it. Federal workers also tend to enjoy salaries well above the national average, which means the people paying the bills are often people with lower salaries and fewer benefits than federal workers.
Hellbound and Down 