2 ms·
It's not that we don't. It's that we can't. Most public sector jobs have a ratchet on cost to employ. i.e. cost only goes up over time. For instance, you cannot
by scarejunba 7y ago
It's not that we don't. It's that we can't. Most public sector jobs have a ratchet on cost to employ. i.e. cost only goes up over time. For instance, you cannot employ a janitor for BART even though you need one. Why? The rules say you have to keep him and pay him a guaranteed payout pension etc. etc. To be clear, I'm not against that or anything. Just stating how things are.
It is optimal under these conditions to minimize employment from the state and where possible spread it across regions.
Also, you can't really create a new job for lots of people because when you get a sufficient size they become a powerful economic lobbying force with strong allies and good rhetoric. After all "should our X be paid only Y while NFL/NBA/mayors etc. get paid Z?" is pretty convincing to lots of people.
So when you create jobs you need to put them in places where there are opposing forces. If you just created construction jobs, you'd be paying them $150k each all the time, and you'd always have to expand it. The rhetoric works very well here "should the people responsible for the safety of our bridges only be paid Z?". Now, if you create jobs that people don't want people working on, you get natural limiters. No one wants a massive TSA. People will complain if there is over-sizing of the TSA and they see lots of people standing around.
This isn't necessarily conscious. Just the result of the constraints and people acting locally optimally. i.e. no one needs to say "let's choose TSA jobs over bridge maintenance jobs". All you need is someone in the room to say "I can't give you that budget for the bridge maintenance because then I have to give that other guy the budget for the tunnel maintenance and I don't think I can get approval for everyone because jurisdiction Y doesn't have any bridges or tunnels" while the TSA is pretty uniformly spread and so it applies to nearly everyone evenly.