Government's answer to controlling spending: Layoffs and more layoffs

The Tea Party republicans are really making their voices heard, "We don't want to pay any more taxes, period!" Actually, it is more like we don't want to pay any taxes, but that's another story. The general politicians response on the federal, state, and local level is to have hiring freezes, pay freezes and now they are talking about layoffs, major layoffs.

Now, gee, with unemployment rates in many states at an all time high, do more layoffs really make sense? The government is still going to have to pay out unemployment for many former employees for who knows how long.

This is not a smart strategy. I am sure there is waste in many other areas of government that have nothing to with employee salaries and benefits, but they are not favorable targets like poor working class people.

Ages ago government jobs had to offer great benefits and pensions in order to compete with private industry. Now private industry jobs are disappearing faster than ever, and therefore government no longer wants to offer jobs with benefits to its workers. Instead of just laying off people indiscriminately, government should go to their workers' labor unions and ask them to grandfather their benefits, and make sacrifices in order to keep their jobs, and not even think about job cuts to contribute to the welfare rolls.

I recently heard a quote from some congressional committee looking to save money, that many federal employees are making six figure salaries and doing much better than their private sector counterparts. The reason federal workers in the DC area make so much money is because housing is so damn expensive, to quote former NY gubernatorial candidate Jimmy McMillan, "The rent is too damn high!" Therefore they have to pay workers big salaries. Housing subsidies for government workers would be one way to justifiably lower federal workers salaries, but just making stupid comments like federal workers are making more than private sector workers is just ridiculous, and meant to get Tea Party yahoos all roused and riled up.

During the Great Depression, President Roosevelt created the Work Projects Administration, which actually created jobs for the many unemployed. This is what we need now, not Tea Party Republicans pushing their government shrinking agenda.

Laying off government workers is not a solution to our economic woes, it will just contribute to already out of control unemployment, and do little else. It is just another way the rich want to make sure that they don't have to pick up the bill through increased income taxes which is what they should be doing.