Today's Boston Herald has a follow-up to yesterday's story by Jay Fitzgerald that implied that the lion's share of federal stimulus funds were hijacked by the Patrick administration to pay for "hack" government jobs. Yesterday's front-page story, headlined "GOV'S STIM FLAM" on the front and "Stimulus saves hacks" on the inside, made it seem like the Patrick administration had chosen to steer stimulus funds toward public-sector jobs.
Today's story, buried deep in the paper and the website (and without any link to the previous story), gives more than a passing notice to the fact that much of the stimulus funding in question was specifically earmarked by the feds for hiring or retaining public-sector employees. (It's not quite a correction, more of a grudging acknowledgment that maybe Patrick isn't lying on this score.)
Putting aside the specifics of this particular story, my question for the Herald is, when did they start using "hack" to describe every single person in the public sector, no matter what their qualifications, salaries, duties, and competence in performing their jobs?
Here's the lead to yesterday's story: "Gov. Deval Patrick's economic-stimulus program is looking more like a Save-A-Hack telethon with a federal cash infusion going mostly to save jobs on the government payroll."
But the story only mentions “schoolteachers, police and firefighters” as examples of workers who benefit from the “Save-A-Hack” move. There’s nothing about Marian Walsh-type job offers, excessive pensions, or anything else to distinguish hackery from state workers just doing their jobs.
Admittedly, it’s easier to cover politics and government when all public-sector workers are characterized as hacks.* It means that’s a silly waste of time to try to make government more effective, to try to determine which programs actually work and which employees are productive. All that matters is that the public payroll, like the crime rate, must come down at any cost. (I’m eager to see how Charlie Baker, the leading Republican nominee for governor, deals with this proposition.)
I recall when “hack” referred to the minority of public-sector employees who were trying to scam the system, but maybe we can coin a new term to separate them from people who actually put in a full day’s work – something with as much panache as another Herald favorite, “perv.” But I may just be behind on my vocabulary. When I consult my American Heritage, the definition of “hack” doesn’t mention the public sector at all. It does, however, mention the far older and more universally accepted definition of a hack as someone who produces “routine or commercial writing.”
*I suspect that most Herald readers allow for some exceptions to the rule. For example, “The guy at my city’s first-time-homeowner program who helped get me a mortgage = nice, hard-working fellow. The woman in the office next door trying to help families find places to live after their apartment building burned down = hack!”
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