

Brad DeLong: Does Washington Care About Unemployment? - skmurphy
http://theweek.com/bullpen/column/203544/does-washington-care-about-unemployment

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skmurphy
Concluding paragraphs:

Has this recession, which has reduced hiring more than it has increased
layoffs, left the kind of people who converse with the powerful in Washington
secure in their jobs and thus communicating calm while the unemployed are
engulfed in panic? Are we passively watching an unrepresented underclass of
the long-term unemployed created before our eyes?

I don’t know. But this unseemly calm does astonish me.

~~~
starkfist
It's not just political elites, everyone employed by state and federal
governments are in a vastly different economic situation than people employed
in the private sector.

~~~
hga
Indeed; here's just the most recent (this morning) ideological but not
partisan essay/rant I've come across on this topic, which says that "that
federal employees now earn double the compensation of those in the private
sector" on average (quoting a Cato Institute guy):
<http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/06/026436.php>

That said, it's not universal at the state and local level. In Missouri and my
SW corner of it, state and local workers are getting laid off, having the
salaries frozen, etc.

Again, this is again an "ideological" vs. partisan thing, our new as of 2009
governor who's laid off thousands of state employees is a Democrat. He, the
Republican legislature and the state colleges and universities have worked out
an agreement whereby if they don't raise tuition they won't get their state
funding cut.

To tie this back to the original essay, Reagan famously noted that the reason
the D.C. suburbs were some of the wealthiest in the nation was "that's where
your money is going to".

