The headline atop the front page of this morning’s Boulder Camera suggests a city struggling diligently to balance its budget: “Work-Week Options Eyed”.  Reading this, one might infer that the city is contemplating unpaid furloughs or some other means of reducing payroll outlays, right?  That would be entirely appropriate, given that Boulder faces a $5 million budget shortfall next year. But that is not what the story is about. In the first place, it is not the city that is “eyeing” changes in the work week, but the workers themselves. And what they have in mind is nothing so onerous as unpaid work days;  rather, they have envisioned for themselves four-day work weeks – let’s be candid and call it three-day weekends — as a supposed way to close the budget gap. Thus, instead of shuffling paper for eight hours a day, Monday through Friday, they are proposing to do their paper-shuffling in four ten-hour workdays, presumably Monday through Thursday. Talk about chutzpah!

And where, you might ask, are the savings supposed to come from?  According to the workers, the city’s energy costs would drop, since certain municipal buildings would be closed one day a week. However, any taxpayer hoping to reap a savings bonanza is bound to be disappointed, since the sums involved are laughably small in comparison to Boulder’s $5 million problem. In fact, by having the Boulder Municipal Building go dark one day per week, the city would save a paltry $11,000 per year. We can think of a much easier way to save five or six times that amount — i.e., by eliminating one, presumably superfluous, paper-shuffler from the payroll. Long-term, the savings would be even greater, actually, since there would be one less pension plan to fund.

 A Feudal System

We would surmise that most cities across America are grappling with similar problems.  Unfortunately, so far, they have evidently dodged the hard decisions that will need to be made. We know this is so because, although private-sector unemployment is soaring, we have yet to read of massive layoffs of bureaucrats. Local, state and federal payrolls remain as swollen as ever, and the tax burden thereof has fallen on a shrinking number of still-employed workers.  Our colleague Bill Buckler at The Privateer (click here for a free sample) has characterized the relationship between bureaucrats and taxpayers as feudal. We quote him at length because his analysis is dead-on and points to a gathering storm that few are talking about:

 One Land, Two Economic Nations

“Through the period of 2001-07, the employment of bureaucrats grew twice as fast as did employment in the private, civil American economy. And this is where the current gigantic economic anomaly strikes home. In the private US economy, layoffs are rolling across the land in a tidal wave which has now taken ‘official’ (grossly underestimated) US unemployment up to 9.5 percent. The public service – the number of bureaucrats on the American taxpayers’ payroll – has not declined at all. The modern serfs are losing

their jobs in record numbers and are being moved out of their dwellings (via foreclosures) while their overlords are being kept secure in their jobs with borrowed money and huge budget deficits at all levels of government – federal, state and local. This is a situation of two intertwined economic nations existing inside the same land. One is diving into a fast deepening economic recession/depression while the other economic nation – the ‘official nation’ if you will – stands economically unaffected. So far.”

Just so. Massive public-sector layoffs are inevitable, since it will be impossible to sustain the bloated bureaucracy on the backs of a shrinking and beleaguered work force,  This trend will play out over the next five years and is one reason why any talk of “green shoots” of recovery is absurd.

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