One of the most interesting political statistics I know is that Britain’s Conservative-led Coalition government reduced the number of public sector employees by nearly 1 million — a huge number in a nation with a population edging above 60 million. As Fraser Nelson notes in a recent Telegraph column, this was supposed to be politically disastrous. The opposition Labour party saw it as “a recipe for political suicide.”
Wouldn’t those who were suddenly deprived of the ministrations and services of these public servants resent the party that saw them out the door? In addition, Labour leader Ed Miliband predicted it would result in an additional loss of half a million private sector jobs, presumably because of lack of demand from the fired public employees.
Not quite. The U.K., as Nelson points out, saw the number of private sector jobs rise by 2 million. And the Conservative party improved on its 2010 showing and secured an absolute majority of seats in the House of Commons. It’s often said in politics that no good deed goes unpunished. But in this case the paring down of the public sector was significantly rewarded.
I think there’s a lesson for Republicans here. And that is that you can cut very large numbers of public sector jobs and get both an economic and an electoral reward. It seems that there are a lot of public sector employees whose absence the voting public simply won’t notice, like all those facilitators and liaisons who make work for each other but produce nothing of worth for the public paying for their services. Britain’s government is more centralized than ours, and so the national administration could produce cuts more directly.
But a Republican president and Congress should be able to fashion measures that incentivize or require the paring of public sector payrolls in states and localities — and in universities. The federal government heavily subsidizes a higher education sector that employs more administrators than teachers, and there are many indications that administrative bloat is harmful rather than helpful to the intended beneficiaries. The Obama administration Title IX administrators’ efforts to require universities to set up a system of kangaroo courts to punish alleged sexual misconduct is an outstanding example.
When I ask college and university lobbyists about administrative bloat, they answer by saying that they need to hire these people to meet the requirements of the federal government. The proper response of the federal government is to remove such requirements and perhaps to end subsidization of universities with too high a ratio of administrators to teachers. Let the universities send out the pink slips and see if there is any political significant recoil. I bet none will be perceptible.
