Bad Ideas Made Good

During his campaign for the presidency, in an interaction with the now famous Joe the Plummer, Obama suggested that spreading wealth around was a good idea. I disagreed with him then.

Recently he spoke of a time when someone has made enough money and that after that, it might be fair for government to confiscate any surplus. I disagreed with that too. I thought them both bad ideas.

After a little thinking outside the box, I thought of a way we can turn two bad ideas into a good one. Sort of the way we look at an old saw: Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.

According to some pundits, federal government employees make twice as much as their private sector counterparts. If we assume this is true, then couldn't we say that government employees have made more than enough? Couldn't we spread that wealth around?

How much would we save if we cut government salaries to their private sector equivalents? How much debt could we pay off? Or how much could we reduce taxes? I say we redistribute the excess salaries to the taxpayers who would then spend those savings creating demand for products and creating jobs for those who make them. And how do we respond with the federal workers who create an uproar over the cuts? Heh. To quote a smart New Jersey governor: "You don't have to work for us." :) There are millions of people looking for work that would love those jobs ...