Are the public sector layoffs justified?

I am not in favor of the " public service" employees.........garbage collectors, rescue personell,public school teachers, 'free clinics', public health departments, postal workers, bus drivers, etc and etc,......being treated unfairly. The "public" needs to recognize their contribution and pay them fairly.

I am also not in favor of " threatening" me with a refusal to do your job. The public should not be held hostage!

The union(s) have provided a GREAT service to employees and their protection. There time has been served.

Do your job for a fair wage, or else, you are simply keeping someone from having a job.

I AM 100% for finding the best person to do the job at a reasonable and liveable wage. "Public service" or "government" jobs are not exempt from performance criteria.

Fair pay, for teachers and dishwashers. If you work, you deserve to be able to live off of your labor.

The lay-offs in public sector jobs affect working- and middle-class conservatives, liberals, and everyone else. The lay-offs are suggested by politicians who, political leanings aside, do not care about people in lower wealth brackets. Democrats, Republicans.It's class warfare.

Lay offs mean that hard-working people lose their means of income. This is never "a good thing. " Plenty of people have been laid off in the private and public sectors already, and the economy hasn't magically recovered.

Meanwhile, CEOs and investors have gotten very wealthy.

As a public sector employee I understand that I am subject to the same economic forces as private sector employees. Nobody wants to be laid off but some times the economic situation requires it.

When fiscal conservatives develop the intestinal fortitude to actually perform an honest cost benefit analysis, they generally will find that in order to balance government overspending, they must look at personnel costs. Not only salaries but benefits and retirement costs. Start at the top.

Why should we, the taxpayers, have to pay the President for the rest of his or her lifetime after serving at the most, eight years? What private sector company does that? The same goes for our distinguished Senators and Representatives.

Their lifetime benefits, even while serving jail time for malfeasence in office, is still payed by us. Breakdown the actual need for all government employees and determine if they are needed or not. We could save billions of dollars by pairing down the total number of people working in government by getting the government out of our lives and serving as originally intended.

Some are justified and even necessary. Over the years, government has grown, in some cases, to be too big. Jobs were created in the "fat" years that were not necessary but government had excess money to spend.

Now, that it is in the "lean" years, it has to cut back to do more with less, just like we all do. As a employee, I do not wish to see anyone's job downsized, but it is the way of life sometimes. Especially in light of today's economic situation.

I posited that because people have less money to spend, governments collect less in sales taxes which affect local, state, and national budgets. Therefore, some belt tightening is necessary. Of course, they could try something else as well, like raising fines and actually collecting them.

Public sector is not a business. They provide essential services. They include schools, law-enforcement, health care, infra-structure maintenance.

It is not a good. It makes the economy worse. It also make the private sector worse.

Public sector lay-offs affect small businesses too.

The solution is to increase taxes on the wealthy corporations and individuals. Close their tax loop holes. Taxes are based on income.

The wealthy ones in the US already pays too little taxes.

GE did not pay any taxes for the last two years.

In 2010 they made $14 billion in profits and we had to pay them $3 billion in tax credits.

The most profitable company Exxon Mobil did not pay any taxes in 2009 while they made $19 billion dollars in profits.

Instead of paying taxes they took $156 million in tax rebates from other tax payers like you and me.

Chevron made $10 million in profits in 2009 but took a refund of $19 million. Imagine, we had to pay them again after we have painfully paid them at the gas pumps.

These oil companies also took $6.2 millions in tax subsidies from our pockets. There is more and I could go on and on.

Our politicians, mainly Republicans, have millions of dollar of bribes from these oil companies to protect their corporate interest.

These are only a few examples of how large companies pay no tax or pay too little tax. In fact, they burden us by having their tax credits and cause lay-offs in the public sector.

If corporations can maximize their profits, why can't our government increase our tax revenues from these wealthy groups.

There is simply no justification to lay-off public sector employees so that corporations can walk away with billions.

Please read my hub of Government Spending and taxes during recession.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.