Poorly paid public sector workers?

People in the public sector are generally presumed to be paid less than comparably employed private sector workers, thereby excusing the enormous security benefits of "a job for life" (by the way, good luck with this presumed benefit guys...), a gold-plated pension plan, and if truth be plainly stated the decent-if-not-exceptional across-the-board negotiated annual salary increases (that result in strikes if they don't materialise, or are just deemed insufficient bribes to keep the votes coming).

My experience is that in reality, most if not all of those public sector workers are actually paid pretty well relative to comparable private sector workers. And they also have those other less tangible assumed benefits listed above into the bargain too.

Now if you factor that approximately half the working population works in the public sector currently, even on official statistics, and therefore logically must be paid from the taxes extracted from the other half of the population who work in the private sector, you have to come to the mathematical conclusion that this has moved beyond the point of sustainability at this point. The public sector half of a population cannot continue to enjoy the same level of income as the other half in the private sector, when "only" half the income of the private sector is being taken from them in various taxes. Already you can see that this just has to blow up at some point - that's just basic mathematics.

Now if you further factor in that a sizeable chunk of the "private sector" workers actually work for businesses providing services in support of the public sector, you push the true level of "public employment" way over 50% of the working population. This clearly makes the economics of paying all these people even more unsustainable than it already appeared at first blush.

Now, further still, consider also the unemployed on benefits. Apparently 1 in 5 of the adult population in the UK is unemployed just now. Where does the money come from to pay these people their benefits? Certainly it doesn't originate from any public sector workers, because their income originates from the taxes taken from the private sector as already discussed above.

Even further now, what about all those other "benefits" like child tax credit, free childcare funding, etc -- none of which are limited to private sector workers of course. Again, this can only ultimately originate from one source -- the private sector.

To put it much more bluntly, the public sector and the welfare state are merely parasites surviving on the enforced extraction of resources from the private sector. I think there are few people who would be able to hold an objective argument with this position.

It's a damned good job that all those unemployed people and workers in the public sector (largely unionised I might note here) have an equal vote with the workers in the private sector eh? Since they outnumber the private sector workers, Labour can continue to milk them for reliable votes paid for with other people's money, to stay in power. At least until such time as even a significant number among the recipients of the bribes can see that something smells fishy and perhaps Labour are going to bankrupt us all (again) with this "redistribution of wealth".

How long can a Ponzi scheme like this possibly continue? So far it has taken a number of decades for the steadily increasing number of parasites gorging off the dwindling carcass of a private sector to have now arrived at this point where something akin to 70% of the population exist at the expense of the remaining 30%.

Our nation is reaching the point of no return in our efforts to print up extra funny paper money to keep the game going. Every pound that is created, reduces the value of every pre-existing one, and over the last year we have printed up an unprecedented number of new pounds and used them to buy our own public sector debt (just like Mugabe and Gono did in Zimbabwe recently -- that turned out well for them didn't it?) so that the public sector workers and the unemployed could continue to receive their bribes. Are we going to be able to keep stumbling along now until we get to the almost-mythical ratio in this world of 80-20? What will life be like if we do? It's bad enough out here in the real world already...

Stop the ride, I've had enough and I wanna get off.