Failed again by our savior

Robyn "Blumñata" Blumner of The St. Petersburg Times graces us with yet another editorial sermon this week.

She starts out with a hellfire & brimstone bang:

Once again the taxpayer comes to the rescue of investors.

She's fueled again by her outrage that the supposedly sensible socialism of redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor is being turned on its head by the federal bailout of lenders. It's as though she doesn't realize that the investors are, generally speaking, the taxpayers.

clipped from www.ntu.org

Percentiles Ranked by AGI	AGI Threshold on Percentiles	Percentage of Federal Personal Income Tax Paid
Top 1%	$364,657	39.38
Top 5%	$145,283	59.67
Top 10%	$103,912	70.30
Top 25%	$62,068	85.99
Top 50%	$30,881	96.93
Bottom 50%	<$30,881	3.07
Note: AGI is Adjusted Gross Income Source: Internal Revenue Service

This isn't Blumner's point, however. This is just one of those nuggets of disinformation we are regularly fed by newspapers as the background for the latest news and opinion.

Her real point concerns the plight of low wage earners, in particular the way nobody looks out for them.

A scathing review of the way workers' complaints have been mishandled and ignored by the Wage and Hour Division of the Labor Department has just been issued by the Government Accountability Office — Congress' investigative arm. The two reports (first and second) released Tuesday highlight the way the division has failed to follow through on valid complaints, particularly for low-wage workers, leaving some cheated out of thousands of dollars in earned wages.

Blumner, who regards the powerful federal government as pretty much the best thing about the United States (see here and here), puts herself in an odd position with this column. The bad guy in this tale of woe is the federal government. And credit to Blumner for not trying to pin the fault on George W. Bush this time, which must have been a terrific temptation for her. The GAO reports make clear that the trend easily encompasses the previous administration.

And what is that trend? Quite simply, a decreasingly vigorous attempt at enforcing labor laws, though in the first report cited, at least, a big part of the problem with the government agency in question (the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor) is its shifting criteria for its own success.

The extent to which WHD’s activities have improved FLSA compliance is unknown because WHD frequently changes both how it measures and how it reports on its performance. When agencies provide trend data in their performance reports, decision makers can compare current and past progress in meeting long-term goals. While WHD’s long-term goals and strategies generally remained the same from 1997 to 2007, WHD often changed how it measured its progress, keeping about 90 percent of its measures for 2 years or less.

So the government is doing a horrible job. Our supposed savior doesn't give a flip.

Predictably, Blumñata uses her bully pulpit to condemn the government's sin of not having enough government employees to stem the tide of private sector evil. If we would just hire enough deacons (at a comfortable living wage, no doubt) to ensure that employers were properly obeying laws that tend to hurt overall employment and discourage workers who want to work overtime from having that opportunity then the entire congregation would be happy.

Perhaps they'll have to be encouraged to give more when the plate is passed. But Blumner would see that as a good thing.

What she isn't likely to notice is that fact that what she called the "best" thing about our country back in March has failed us yet again. And I've got news for her. It's a pattern. Blumner was right when she wrote that the market by its nature is uncaring. When she begins to realize that the same is true of government then she'll begin to have a clue as to what she's talking about.

Good people make the difference in either case, but the free market has no built in hindrance from the demons of bureaucracy.