It's nothing personal. It's just business. Be careful what you wish for.

Chris Christie, NJ Gov., was on Today and Morning Joe this morning. Anne and Mika accused him of union busting. He denied it, contending that with less money to spend, he was trying to save public sector union jobs by lowering payroll benefit costs rather than through layoffs. A tad disingenuous perhaps, but few are noticing.

Well, the real problem for state budgets is not that public sector workers are paid better wages and dramatically better benefits than private sector workers. The real problem for the local economy is that there are too many non revenue generating public sector jobs. In the last period, according to Christie, NJ lost 20,000 public sector jobs and gained 15,000 private sector jobs. That is the trend around the country. I am sorry for those that lost their jobs, but now there are more productive taxpayers . With lower expenses states can lower taxes to attract new businesses and taxpayers. In the end there will be more jobs, just different ones, and the economy will recover. You can blame the rich, the Chinese, the greedy corporations exporting jobs, Wall Street, Congress, the Banks, the military industrial complex or whoever you want for the bad economy. It does not matter. When times are tough there is no choice but to tighten your belt, cut your expenses, and work a little harder until things get better.

The unions are mobilizing to stop Republican and Democrat gubernatorial efforts to roll back public sector wages and benefits by limiting unions power and fund raising abilities. The unions may well in the short run stop the union busting. This is a stroke of luck for the country. We do not want to lose our all our private sector unions. Remember Lech Walesa and the Solidarity union in Poland. On the other hand states and municipalities will be hard pressed to borrow or tax their way out of their deficits and will have no choice but to curtail government jobs and services.

The public sector is too big. Cutting public sector wages and benefits may eventually lessen the attraction of public sector jobs and reduce their numbers. On the other hand, massive layoffs of public sector workers is a much faster solution. The sad part is that one consequence will be lower quality in education as seniority rules will prevent any attempts to prune the deadwood via layoffs. For better or worse, privatization of the educational system may well accelerate as the value of public education declines.