Sunday, November 14, 2010

A Spooky Halloween Stimulus Story

I was at a Halloween costume party, and struck up a conversation with a hippy. At least I believe he was a hippy, he could have been from the '70s TV show 'Mod Squad". It was kind of hard to tell and I didn't consider it proper Halloween etiquette to ask. He had recently moved here after losing his job in California. And the crazy thing was he lost his job due to the stimulus bill.

He was a contractor that was somehow involved with troops preparing to ship out to the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. From what I could pick up he was a high end physical trainer that worked with troops for 3 weeks in the California desert educating them and getting them physically ready for deployment. But after the stimulus bill was passed, someone in the government decided they needed to terminate his contract, and the contracts of others doing the same work, so they could 'create' new job doing the exact same thing. But the real beauty of this plan is that because the people who replaced them are government employees, rather then contractors, they receive better pay and full benefits. In fact, the new jobs payed so well the government could afford to hire one new employee for every three contractors. Yep, we traded 1 employee trainer for every 3 contract trainers. So now our troops have 1/3 as many people preparing them for desert deployment then they did prior to Congress passing the stimulus bill. BUT someone in the inner bowels of our government bureaucracy can add to the number of jobs 'created' by the stimulus. These are the same people who want to control our health care system.

The best part: My Halloween hippy friend also told me these new government employees are union members.



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