I would like to comment on a letter to the editor written by Mr.
Carl Jacobson of Bangkok, Thailand, and printed in the Gilroy
Dispatch on May 10th.
I would like to comment on a letter to the editor written by Mr. Carl Jacobson of Bangkok, Thailand, and printed in the Gilroy Dispatch on May 10th.
Mr. Jacobson asks rhetorically if I want to have a group of 69-year-old firefighters show up if my house catches on fire. He mentions that many public servants risk their lives in the course of their employment. He admits, or perhaps brags, that he retired from a government job at age 51, and closes with a quip: “Luck is when opportunity meets preparation.”
Now, I do not know if Mr. Jacobson had one of those dangerous government jobs, such as firefighter or A-10 pilot, or whether the biggest risk he ran in his thirty years was the daily danger of incurring a paper cut from the reams of documents he shuffled across his desk.
If he had a security clearance, he will never be able to tell us what he did, whether he was a clandestine CIA operative or merely a NAVSEA engineer.
But this is what I do know about the public sector versus the private sector. Government employees are, by and large, paid more for equivalent work than their counterparts in private industry. They have better job security. They have better benefits and much better retirement packages.
And government employees are paid out of taxes, whereas private employees are paid out of profits. In effect, private enterprise supports government single-handedly.
When a business owner hires an employee, he has to ask himself, is this person going to be worth what I pay for his salary and benefits? Is he going to make me money or cost me money?
The government bureaucrat who hires a lower level government bureaucrat is not paying the new hire’s salary or benefits directly. He is not risking his own money. He is more apt to be thinking, is this guy going to do well enough in this slot, but not so well that he gets promoted over my head? It is no skin off his nose to offer a great salary and benefits package. The taxpayer is going to be footing the bill.
The above explains part of why government jobs are so cushy compared to private sector jobs. The other reason is the government employees unions.
Mr. Jacobson is only part of the problem, not part of the solution when he “prepares” for retirement by taking advantage of every “opportunity.” “Milking the system” is the phrase that most aptly describes his actions. I would never call opportunism luck.
Mr. Jacobson’s initial question about 69-year-old firefighters utilizes a double fallacy: ad baculum and bifurcation. (A double fallacy is quite a feat, but not one worthy of congratulations.)
The ad baculum (Latin) fallacy is an appeal “to the stick.” It is the fallacy of the veiled threat. In this case, the veil is thin: “If you don’t allow firefighters to retire at age fifty with 3 percent of their pay for each year worked, your house will burn down.”
His second fallacy, bifurcation, is the either/or fallacy. An example, courtesy of “Introductory Logic” by Wilson and Nance, Mars Hill, is: “She killed the wicked witch of the east. So she must be a good witch, or a bad witch.”
In truth, she might not be a witch at all. And just because firefighters do not retire at 50 with ninety percent of full salary does not mean they have to keep working as firefighters.
Some firefighters will be promoted into desk jobs. The others can – let’s not call it retire – go on sabbatical at 50, and keep accruing that pension until they reach a decent retirement age, say 65 or 70.
Firefighters often have a schedule where they work four days and are off four days. Many, maybe most, have a second job that they work at during their days off. I understand that selling real estate is popular. So when those hoses get too heavy, they could ease into their second job – and by all means collect their earned retirement, once they get to a decent age for retirement.
That would be fair. Three at 50 is not – not to the taxpayer.
