The wise, old sages wizened, old bastards of the Seattle Times editorial board continue to cheer on public sector job cuts:

THE cuts in public employment during the past two years were painful but necessary. Probably the process is not over. Public jobs are carried by the private economy, and the private economy is still weak.

The Times recently reported that state full-time equivalent jobs are down a total of 7 percent in fiscal 2010 and 2011. That does not include higher education, which has had few job losses. It includes everything else.

[...] There is a thought that the state should not do this — that its layoffs are making the downturn worse, and that it should keep everyone on the payroll. It is a warm thought, but who would pay for it? The state cannot do it with bonds. New taxes on the private sector would probably snuff out as many private jobs as public jobs sustained.

Granted, I'm no economist. But then, neither are they, so just for once I'd like to see them attempt to fucking justify their economic assumptions instead of simply asserting them as if they're as immutable as gravity.

I mean, here's my problem: Government jobs are generally good jobs. Not great jobs, but good. Lower paying than the private sector, with a much lower earning ceiling, but more secure and with decent benefits. And perhaps best of all, they already exist.

So if our goal is "job creation"—which nearly every pundit and politician tells us should be the government's number one goal these days—why the fuck would we be so eager to eliminate these public sector jobs in the hope of maybe/sorta "probably" creating a low-tax business climate in which companies might create more private sector jobs?

A bird in the hand, and all that. At it's core, the editors are arguing to cut jobs in the hope of creating jobs. Where's the sense in that?

The fact is that the conservative economic arguments the editors faithfully regurgitate are built on a moral argument: That public sector jobs are inherently bad, and that private sector jobs are inherently good, on principle... not on any economic reality. It is, by the way, the same moral argument that permits us to dismantle and disinvest in public universities, as opposed to raising the tax revenue sufficient to pay for them, despite the fact that very few investments return more to the long term health of our state's economy than a top-notch higher education system.

I mean, if it's worth doing, I guess the market will take care if it, right? Anything else is socialism.

Which I guess may be true. I dunno. Like I said, I'm not a trained economist. It's just that proposing to run a government based on such an unchallenged assumption, well, it just strikes me as kinda stupid.