The Cost of Hollow Government

CBS organized a kind of economic town hall meeting with President Obama and has most of it piecemeal (with a commercial for every piece) on its website.  This is a question from a laid-off federal government worker (the National Zoo) that more than anything I've seen makes concrete the fact that loose talk and action affecting government programs have consequences for real people.  As President Obama said before--and says again here--these people have families and homes, children and lives just like those employed in the private sector.  They aren't aliens.  As he points out here, while the number of private sector jobs have been growing (however slowly) for at least a year, the unemployment rate stays high because government jobs are being lost at every level.  In most cases these people perform useful and needed services, and are often not compensated accordingly even in the best of times.  Now they are literally being called "waste."  It's the human as well as social cost of political cynicism.