Tragedy: Life for federal employees not quite as awesome as it used to be

You know how you've got this job, and maybe it's a pretty good job, but you understand that you will only have the job so long as your company remains in business and performs well enough that it can afford you? Well, if you work for the federal government, no . . . you have no idea about that. Because it has long been the life of a federal employee not to have to worry about it. Your employer could be falling more than $1 trillion short of the revenue it needs to operate, and for you - no worries! Raises continue. Promotions continue. Benefits remain.

The federal government can never close, never stop operating, never run out of money. It's the government. Smile and enjoy. But what would happen if reality were ever to rear it's ugly head, and force federal employees to deal with the same factors that confront the rest of us on a daily basis? Well, that would suck. And now, it does. The AP brings the heart-rendering tale of federal employees shockingly deprived of their lifetime exemption from fiscal reality:

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But federal employees today are working under a three-year pay freeze. Earlier this year, many were furloughed when automatic spending cuts took hold, and about 800,000 were told not to report the money during the current shutdown. There are proposals in Congress to increase retirement contributions for government workers and politicians regularly lash out at federal workers as lazy, overpaid and unnecessary. For Marcelo del Canto, a budget analyst for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in Rockville, Md., working for the government was supposed to be a respite from the ups and downs of the technology industry. ""I worked for some pretty big companies and a lot of these Internet companies that got hit by the dot com bust, so I went through a lot of bankruptcies, laying off workers,"" del Canto said. ""My wife said "You really need to get out of the private sector, the federal government is really the way to go.'"" Both del Canto and his wife, who also works for the government, have been furloughed and they worry about making the next mortgage payment on a house they purchased in March. He says he still loves his job, but ""it"s a very uncomfortable and uneasy situation when you never know if we"re going to shut down. It"s just not something you can plan for and it impacts you on a real basis every day."" Dan Delgado, a furloughed equipment mechanic at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Air Reserve Station, wonders if he should look for a backup job. Delgado, 49, a military veteran, said he had assumed Congress would avert a shutdown at the last minute. ""I thought Uncle Sam never gets broken,"" Delgado said. ""I was blinded somehow.""

The point here is not to enjoy anyone's "misfortune," such that it is, but to look inside the mindset that has brought us to this point. The entire tone of the AP's story is that these workers are confronting unconscionable hardship. That's the way people in Washington think about it. But what has been described here that is any different from what people in the private sector confront on a daily basis? Your employer will pay you as well as is possible - and as well as the value you provide calls for - but if resources are limited, decisions have to be made. You and I understand that. It is not some shocking tragedy. It is simply how life works. Federal employees have no concept of this, or if they do, they went to work for the federal government thinking it was the way to escape it. As long as Democrats are in charge, they are happy to provide that escape from reality. And you can also apply that mindset to spending, budgeting, taxation . . . the Washington mindset is that the federal government should never be denied anything, regardless of available resources. It can borrow. It can print money. It can confiscate your money. It should never be told no, because it's the government, and it's so important. That fuels the fiscal insanity that goes on year after year, and treats any attempt to bring sanity to the situation as some sort of hateful attack on government itself. How dare you try to subject the government to the same realities you have to deal with? Don't you know that's why they went to Washington in the first place? They don't just exempt themselves from the laws they pass. They fully intend to exempt themselves from every economic challenge you simply understand is inherent to life. The reason they are so incensed with Ted Cruz and friends is that they are forcing the Beltway crowd to live like the rest of us, and that includes the consequences you face when you refuse to deal with economic reality. Sorry. Welcome to the real world.