Federal workers more likely to die than lose jobs

Federal employees' job security is so great that workers in many agencies are more likely to die of natural causes than get laid off or fired. Death - rather than poor performance, misconduct or layoffs - is the primary threat to job security at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Small Business Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Office of Management and Budget and a dozen other federal operations. The federal government fired 0.55% of its workers in the budget year that ended Sept. 30 - 11,668 employees in its 2.1 million workforce.

The 1,800-employee Federal Communications Commission and the 1,200-employee Federal Trade Commission didn't lay off or fire a single employee last year. The SBA had no layoffs, six firings and 17 deaths in its 4,000-employee workforce. When job security is at a premium, the federal government remains the place to work for those who want to avoid losing a job. The job security rate for all federal workers was 99.43% last year and nearly 100% for those on the job more than a few years.

White-collar federal workers have almost total job security after a few years on the job. Last year, the government fired none of its 3,000 meteorologists, 2,500 health insurance administrators, 1,000 optometrists, 800 historians or 500 industrial property managers. The nearly half-million federal employees earning $100,000 or more enjoyed a 99.82% job security rate in 2010. Only 27 of 35,000 federal attorneys were fired last year. None was laid off. Death claimed 33.

Feds post 27,000 high-paying job openings during sequester

The budget cuts known as sequestration were supposed to wreak havoc, forcing the shrinking of critical workforces including airport security officers and food inspectors. But since sequestration kicked in March 4, the government has posted openings for 4,300 federal job titles to hire some 10,300 people.

The median position has a salary topping out at $76,000, and one-fourth of positions pay $113,000 or more, according to an analysis by The Washington Times of federal job listings. Altogether, the jobs will pay up to $792 million per year. Including job postings that have been open since before sequestration, the government is in the market for 27,000 employees who will make up to $1.8 billion a year.

They include jobs to provide services to military personnel on bases around the world, including 71 bartenders and 123 waiters. Nearly 200 positions related to Army-run bowling alleys are also open. One position in Hawaii pays up to $110,000 — plus a 12 percent cost-of-living adjustment — to oversee such recreation facilities.

An email from one federal agency indicated that it was intentionally placing the brunt of the cuts on critical and high-profile positions instead of low-priority jobs to lend credence to the dire warnings it had proffered to Congress in a plea for more funding.

In February, Mr. Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, wrote to the Office of Management and Budget to point out that “at the same time the administration is warning sequestration could force laying off or furloughing U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents, Defense civilian employees, or food safety inspectors, the federal government is also soliciting applicants for numerous lower priority jobs.”

Even men of the cloth, who have sworn a vow of poverty, appear to make good money at the federal government, with a dozen chaplain jobs paying up to $100,000 listed since sequestration.

Dead welfare recipients collecting millions of dollars

A state audit has revealed that Massachusetts has given out $18 million in “questionable public assistance benefits” in recent years, in cases that included the distribution of benefits to more than 1,160 people who were either dead or using the Social Security number of a deceased person. In some cases, recipients began receiving benefits for the first time after their deaths. Click here for more information.

Victims of Government

Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson has started a "Victims of Government" website that features victims of over-regulation. Here are some interesting numbers regarding the cost of regulation...

The Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy estimates that it costs Americans $1.75 trillion to comply with federal regulations each year.  To put $1.75 trillion into perspective, that amount is larger than all but eight economies in the world.  It also means that over 10% of the U.S. economy is spent on trying to satisfy rules issued by Washington bureaucrats. That doesn't even include federal, state, and local taxes. 

This heavy regulatory burden diverts resources from innovation to compliance, discourages business investment, and chills job creation. It is no accident that as Washington adds new regulations, more and more Americans are unemployed and underemployed.

From 2003 to 2010, agencies did not publish Notices of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRMs) for approximately 35% of rules with a cost of $100 million or more. This number has nearly doubled since 1998.   NPRMs alert the public that the agency is considering a regulation, gives the public the opportunity to comment on the proposed regulation, and allows the agency to use public input to revise the regulation.  GAO found that when agencies consider public input while drafting legislation, the regulations are often improved and cost less. 

Elected leaders need to carefully consider the costs and negative unintended consequences of unnecessary federal regulations.  They need to remember that real people must comply with these regulations and that making them overly burdensome stifles American growth.

Obamacare: Taxpayers Must Report Personal Health ID Info to IRS

Here are some excerpts from an Americans For Tax Reform article:

When Obamacare’s individual mandate takes effect in 2014, all Americans who file income tax returns must complete an additional IRS tax form. The new form will require disclosure of a taxpayer’s personal identifying health information in order to determine compliance with the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate. As confirmed by IRS testimony to the tax-writing House Committee on Ways and Means, “taxpayers will file their tax returns reporting their health insurance coverage, and/or making a payment”.

This new tax information document must, at a minimum, contain: the name and health insurance identification number of the taxpayer; the name and tax identification number of the health insurance company; the number of months the taxpayer was covered by this insurance plan; and whether or not the plan was purchased in one of Obamacare’s “exchanges”. This will involve millions of new tax documents landing in mailboxes across America every January, along with the usual raft of W-2s, 1099s, and 1098s.  At tax time, the 140 million families who file a tax return will have to get acquainted with a brand new tax filing form.  Six million of these families will end up paying Obamacare’s individual mandate non-compliance tax penalty.

Disabled Nation: Small Fraction Leave Disability Because They Work or Get Better

The Patriot Post has an informative article on the federal disability program signed into law in 1956. Here are some excerpts:

The disability program predictably became a one-way street to government dependency -- a street that gets wider, better paved and more heavily trafficked every year. In 2011, 8,575,544 workers took federal disability benefits. According to the program's latest annual statistical report, which covers 2011, only approximately 0.7 percent of the people on disability that year managed to get off the program because their condition improved or they returned to work and made too much money to still qualify for benefits.

Between 1776 and the early 1950s, Americans built a great nation without a single person collecting a single dime of federal disability benefits. But what has happened to America since Eisenhower signed his law? We have become a disabled nation. The total number of U.S. disability beneficiaries now exceeds the total population of Greece. As of this April, according to the Social Security Administration, the disability program was paying benefits to 10,962,532 individuals. That included a record 8,865,586 disabled workers, 1,936,236 children of disabled workers and 160,710 spouses of disabled workers.

What exactly has forced all these Americans to stop working and start taking checks from the government? Well, the largest categories were those with bad backs, bad ligaments and bad moods. Of the 8,575,544 "workers" in 2011 collecting disability, 2,488,374 -- or 29 percent -- did not work because of problems with their "musculoskeletal system and connective tissue." Another 1,304,851 -- or 15.2 percent -- did not work because they had a "mood disorder."

Over the past four and a half decades, the ratio of full-time workers to disabled workers has dramatically declined. In January 1968, there were 64,640,000 full-time workers and 1,202,115 workers taking disability -- a ratio of 54 to 1. In January 2013, there were 115,918,000 full-time workers and 8,830,026 workers taking disability -- a ratio of 13 to 1.

The declining ratio of full-time workers to disabled worker is evidence of a dramatic cultural change. America's work ethic has been replaced by the dependency ethic compounded by the disability ethic.

"Free" Phones

1 in 10 Maryland residents get their telephone free from the Lifeline subsidy program. The Baltimore Sun reported Sunday that the number signed up for free telephones in the aptly named Free State has exploded 90-fold from a mere 5,821 in 2008 to nearly 509,000 in 2012. The number would have been higher if not for a targeted Federal Communications Commission audit that pushed more than 230,000 freeloading Marylanders off the program late last year.

The Lifeline program was started as part of the Universal Service Fund in 1985. Legislators from rural states thought it was a great idea to tax the telephones of city dwellers to cover the cost of running telephone lines to remote locations in, for example, Alaska. With tens of billions in taxes paid, the goal of universal service was accomplished. Landline phones are widely available with wireless alternatives available to fill gaps in availability. So the program shifted focus.

As much as supporters insist this program is needed for the poor, it smells more like a program for well-connected cronies. Calls have grown louder on Capitol Hill for congressional review, reform or even repeal of Lifeline. Reformers must be prepared, however, to run up against a gantlet of proponents, including telecommunications companies that have profited handsomely from this corporate welfare. The top Lifeline provider, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim’s TracFone, has received $1,506,634,841 from taxpayers. Mr. Slim is one of the major shareholders of The New York Times. Telecommunications firms won’t give up without a fight, and it’s up to the public, gouged on every telephone bill, to tell Congress to hang up the phone.

Illegal Aliens Got Food Stamps by the “Vanload”

Here are some excerpts from a JudicialWatch.org article regarding illegal aliens getting food stamps:

For decades the U.S. government has knowingly given illegal immigrants food stamps, according to a former certification case worker who denounced the costly practice back in the 1980s but was essentially ordered to keep a lid on it.

The retired assistant case manager, Craig McNees, was in charge of vetting food-stamp applicants in north Florida and Indiana in the ’80s and says the program was infested with fraud and corruption that was perpetually ignored by management. “Illegals would come in by the vanload and we were told to give them their stuff,” McNees said. “Management knew very well they were illegal. It was so rampant that some employees would tell their illegal relatives to come get food stamps.”

The retired case worker who contacted JW says in the three years he worked in a Sarasota food-stamp office, he found more than 500 cases of fraud but management ignored them all instead pushing a yearly quota. “They just said that if we don’t give out as many as last year, we don’t get our money,” McNees said. “It was crazy, like a three-ring circus; like the inmates were running the asylum.”

Adding insult to injury, last spring the USDA Inspector General revealed that many food-stamp recipients use their welfare benefit to buy drugs, weapons and other contraband from unscrupulous vendors. Some trade food stamps for reduced amounts of cash, the USDA watchdog told Congress, disclosing that the fraud has cost taxpayers nearly $200 million. None of this surprises McNees, who claims he witnessed so much fraud as a food-stamp case worker that he “could write a book.”