A writer for Kiplinger, a respected source of business forecasts and personal-finance advice, composed a list of "13 careers for the next decade."
"U.S. companies, saddled with increasingly onerous costs of employing people, are downsizing, cutting employees' hours, hiring temps, automating jobs and sending work offshore. ...," the author noted. "New competition for jobs looms in the form of 12 to 20 million illegal immigrants likely to get legalized in the years ahead. Perhaps most potent, the U.S. is experiencing the largest transfer of gross domestic product from the private sector to the government sector in history -- and shifting jobs along with it."
So, what came in at the top of Kiplinger's list of up-and-coming careers? The federal bureaucracy.
"The federal government will be the largest source of new jobs, with 300,000 hires expected within the next two years," Kiplinger reported. "And those jobs will not be just in Washington, D.C., but all over the U.S. and across the world. Federal job security and benefits are nonpareil, and salaries are more competitive than is widely believed."
Can you believe that? In a time when the national debt is approaching $14.3 trillion, the federal government actually intends to add 300,000 people to a bloated payroll that is already 2 million employees strong.
Those "nonpareil" benefits and that ironclad job security are a result of federal union lobbying. And many of the new 300,000 federal workers will promptly become union members to boost their clout, pay and benefits even more -- all at the expense of private-sector workers, millions of whom have lost their jobs in the recession.
A nation is in deep trouble when government -- which redistributes but doesn't create wealth -- comes to be seen as the top source of future employment.