Once again the things I have been saying for 10 years are finally being published in the newspapers. It is not the job of our elected representatives to create more and more public sector jobs, when are they going to get the message.

Western New York is hemmoraging population, losing 40% of highly qualified people to the south, yet government jobs continue to grow at a staggering rate. This has got to stop, fewer and fewer people are left here to fund with our tax dollars the continued growth of government.

Time to wake up and get to the polling places to start voting these people out of office. Do you think Spitzer will stop this? Highly unlikely…

Buffalo News - Public payroll outpaces private growth
The number of unionized public employees in state climbs while private industry stagnates

New York’s next governor, if he wants to change the state’s economic and political landscape, will have to deal with a slew of potent public-employee unions that have added members this decade far faster than private industry has added jobs.

The number of unionized public employees in New York has hit an all-time high of more than 1 million, or one out of every eight workers.

For the rest of the nation, which lacks the union penetration found in New York, the ratio is one in 19, according to a recent report by the Empire Center for New York State Policy.

The center found that the numbers of school and government employees has mushroomed statewide this decade in the face of stagnant population growth and as the economy slogged back from a recession worsened by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Meanwhile, private-sector employment still has not rebounded to July 2000 levels.

“Government employment doesn’t shrink, it doesn’t decline, even when the population is shrinking,” said Empire Center Director Edmund J. McMahon, who hopes the report restrains state leaders from further rewarding the unions that hold clout in Albany and elsewhere.

By the end of this year’s legislative session, election-minded state lawmakers had lavished more than $1 billion worth of benefits on union workers, who tend to provide cash and field assistance for political campaigns. Gov. George E. Pataki has vetoed most of those benefits.

“They are the tail wagging the dog in Albany,” McMahon said of the public service unions. “In fact, they are increasingly becoming the dog.”

A political action committee run by the New York State United Teachers gave more than any other PAC in 2004, $1.3 million.

The 20,000 employees added to public school districts accounted for about half of the new government workers hired outside New York City so far this decade, according to the Empire Center, an arm of the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute. The rest were scattered among categories not broken out in federal data: counties, cities, towns and villages.

Union leaders interpret the employment trends differently than the Empire Center does.

Buffalo-Niagara’s private-sector job growth this decade has been mediocre, six times worse than the state average. But the region’s largest employer - state government - grew its work force by nearly 9 percent by adding some 1,700 jobs from July 2000 to July 2006, mainly in higher education.

And the government workers are more secure, their benefits are better, and they make more money, the Empire Center concluded. Regional economies, especially rural economies, increasingly rely on taxpayer-provided jobs.

In 51 of New York’s 62 counties, the average salary for state- and local-government jobs exceeds the private-sector average.