Sprint Nextel is doing it to be more profitable and accountable to shareholders. So?s Yahoo. So?s Morgan Stanley and student loan giant Sallie Mae. It?s a tough assignment, but cutting jobs is what companies sometimes must do when their plans don?t match what customers want to buy in the quantities anticipated or with the market?s behavior.
Here?s who is NOT doing it: Maryland ? at a time of supposed fiscal crisis requiring a special session and a host of new taxes.
Gov. Martin O?Malley would have you believe the opposite.
He touted the claim that he cut 500 positions from the state budget.
That?s technically true. Thursday morning, the Board of Public Works followed through on his plan by voting to “cut” 500 state jobs this year. But no one held those positions ? many were vacant for more than a year ? and another 4,500 positions sit vacant. In the real world, cutting jobs means the anguished firing of real people, not the idea of them.
The kicker is that many of those positions could not have been funded. According to the Board of Public Works agenda, the state could cut $9.98 million from the budget by eliminating the jobs. That translates to about $20,000 per job ? or less than half the $49,920 salary of the average state worker, according to the Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation?s most recent statistics.
So the real number of jobs cut is much fewer.
The other problem with the “cut” is that the governor funded 976 new positions in the latest budget, 666 (weird, we know) of which he recommended for the executive branch. (The remainder are school positions guided by formulas and judicial positions, which he constitutionally must include in the budget.) That?s a net gain of 476 positions after the “cut.” That reminds us of the claim then Baltimore Mayor O?Malley made that he had created “thousands of jobs,” when in fact the city lost thousands of jobs under his tenure. He explained the aberration by saying he never claimed to have created more jobs than were lost.Hmm.
Aside from being disingenuous, O?Malley?s budget reveals there never really was a crisis. If there were, all of those remaining 4,500 steadily vacant positions would have been eliminated along with real people, as businesses must do when revenue fails to match expenses. Right?
Wrong. Because government does not operate like a business or family, and we do not hold our elected officials to the same standards as corporate boards and shareholders hold chief executive officers. We can start by demanding all vacant positions be cut and an audit of all current positions be performed to determine necessity. If we must sacrifice by transferring a higher percent of our incomes to Annapolis, so must the government.
