“I’m watching Barack Obama on television talking about his plan for a “pay freeze” for White House senior staff. This is a nice gimmick, but it’s stupid policy. The amount of taxpayer money saved will be tiny. Meanwhile, this sort of thing can have a quite destructive impact on the public interest. One thing any administration needs, for example, is well-qualified lawyers. And well-qualified lawyers have the opportunity to earn quite a bit of money in the private sector. And while it’s perfectly reasonable to ask people to take something of a paycut when entering public service, there are limits to how much you can really ask people to give up. We don’t want to overpay our public sector workers, but we also don’t want to deprive the government of qualified staff.” — Matthew Yglesias
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How many lawyers does it take…I’m sure there is a joke in here. Yeah, lets not make any effort to save any amount of money and for sure lets get more lawyers hired! Just the change I was hoping would happen!
Hahhaa…on the lawyer thing you have a point. Though I do agree with Matthew Yglesias on this. What do you think of this old Thomas Sowell article on the same thing?
HP, is there a link to the Thomas Sowell article you mentioned? I’d like to read it. By the way, on a completely different note, did you read the report from Gen McAffrey (sp?)on the possible collapse of Mexico? I seem to recall from your post about your grandfather and you mentioning something about the violence in the area where he lived. I was curious about that at the time and then it slipped my mind. Perhaps (if it isn’t too much trouble) you could could contact me at my email address as a sidebar conversation, since this inquiry doesn’t relate to the above post.
I linked to the article in the above comment. It’s hard to see, but if you put your mouse over where it reads, “this old Thomas Sowell article on the same thing”, you will notice there is a link there. Click on it and it should take you to the article in question.
Btw, email has been sent.
There’s a good reason Andrew Sullivan named the “Yglesias Award” after Matthew Yglesias. And Yglesias is right - freezing the pay was a silly gimmick by Obama.
Obama’s latest executive order, on the other hand, closing secret prisons and suspending torture, was just absolutely fantastic. That’s change I can believe in!