It’s the time of the coronavirus, and as we all know, that means that it is the moral responsibility of all governors and state health officials to issue “lockdown” commands, compelling all “non-essential” businesses to close until further notice. Although the sweep and severity of these “lockdown” commands has varied from state to state, at this point the governors of most states have ordered the closure of nearly all restaurants, bars, hotels, gyms, hair salons, and thousands of similar businesses. Obviously, the immediate result of these orders was going to be that the employees of the businesses would get furloughed or laid off. Some 26 million new unemployment claims had been filed by late April, with more undoubtedly to be revealed in the next weekly report.

Of course, with thousands of businesses shuttering, and their revenues disappearing, state and local tax revenues are also falling off a cliff. So if the same rules apply to these governmental entities as to private businesses, they would be about to make massive layoffs as well.

And yet, if you look at discussion about how state and local governments should deal with their own financial issues, somehow the whole idea that government workers might get laid off is beyond the purview of polite discussion. The same people who have effectively ordered the layoff of close to 30 million people in the private sector at the same time think that every single job of a civil service bureaucrat is somehow sacrosanct.

In the New York Times on April 30, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi talks about the “need” for yet another vast round of federal handouts so that state and local governments can avoid layoffs. The number she throws around is (yet another) trillion:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday that state and local governments are seeking up to $1 trillion for coronavirus costs. . . . [S]he said money for “heroes” is needed to prevent layoffs as governors and mayors stare down red ink in their budgets. Many jurisdictions are facing rising costs from the health pandemic and plummeting revenues in the economic shutdown. . . . “This is something of the highest priority," Pelosi said. “It honors our heroes.”

Who are these “heroes”? Good question. The use of that term is the typical diversionary tactic to shift your attention away from the fact that almost none of this money will be going to anything that has to do with coronavirus response. Of health care workers who might legitimately be called “heroes,” the large majority are not state or local government employees at all, and are already mostly funded by federal money. So the trillion is for somebody else. Only a minority of state and local employees are even arguably involved in coronavirus response, and the remainder of the bureaucracy is loaded with lard. This would be the perfect opportunity to start cutting. How about the thousands of professors of victim studies at the state university system; the gazillions of assistant vice deans of diversity and inclusion; the layers of administrative bureaucracy added to K-12 education over the past couple of decades; the unsustainable pension promises that are headed for disaster ten or twenty or thirty year out (depending on the state); the “affordable housing” bureaucrats who only make housing less affordable; the “renewable” energy bureaucrats who drive up the cost of everyone’s electricity? And I am just getting started.

Will Republicans in Congress — or maybe the President — stand up to stop the effort to throw vast federal taxpayer money into this bottomless pit? I have a little hope, but not much. In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, William Galston reports excitedly that “A Bipartisan Plan to Support State Budgets” is taking shape in Congress. It may not be the trillion that Pelosi is hoping for, but it is likely to be another multiple hundreds of billions. The charge is being led by a bipartisan group of Congresspeople who call themselves the “Problem Solvers.” I previously reported on this group of so-called “Problem Solvers” in a post back in August 2017, where I pointed out that every single “solution” that they ever proposed for any and every human problem consisted of throwing vast amounts of federal money at it. Needless to say, it’s no different this time. Why any Republican would associate with this scam, I cannot say. From Galston’s piece:

[There have been] a series of bicameral meetings involving the Problem Solvers and senators of both parties who share the goal of breaking partisan gridlock. These meetings are now bearing fruit. Chaired by Reps. Tom Reed, a New York Republican, and Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, the Problem Solvers are crafting an aid bill for state and local governments that both parties can support. 

Could it really be that every single assistant vice dean in every state university in the country will have his/her job protected even as 20% of the private sector gets forcibly laid off by state command? Yes, that appears to be likely. Hey, who has the political clout here?

As a final example of this phenomenon for today, consider this piece from the New York Post of May 1, by Chris Jones and Kate Slevin of the Regional Plan Association, headline “Why the feds need to bail out the MTA.” Note that New York’s MTA already got about $4 billion from the CARES Act at the end of March, but they are projecting a further budget gap from this virus thing of another $4 billion or more, and are requesting that the feds cover that amount as well in the next bailout bill. In support of the MTA’s request, Jones and Slevin outline the limited options available to the MTA:

To cut expenses, it can either reduce service, delay capital projects or default on bond payments. All of these are bad choices at a time when the region faces a deep recession and the future viability of the transit system is at risk.

Do you notice anything missing there? Somehow, in the view of Jones and Slevin — and maybe of all the New York cognoscenti — reducing employment and/or bringing pensions into line don’t even make it onto a list of options to cut expenses. Apparently, these are the kinds of things that just are not discussed in polite society — even as the same state government thinks nothing of ordering the firing of hundreds of thousands of private sector workers who are overall much lower paid and get no pensions at all. Is there a union contract that stands in the way of bringing these labor costs into line? That’s what bankruptcy is for! This is the perfect opportunity for the MTA to go into bankruptcy and use the occasion to reject and restructure its labor contracts.

Note that I do not at all begrudge the MTA workers their negotiated pay and benefits. But in a time of crisis, when millions are getting laid off, I do not understand why this particular group should have special privilege to keep premium pay and benefits that the state clearly cannot afford. The idea that the feds can solve this by simply passing out piles of the infinite free money is pure delusion.