The most obvious failing by the entire organization is to let the O-line age without drafting intelligently over the last SEVEN years to do something about it. This is inexcusable. I’m just a dumbass fan who doesn’t get paid millions of dollars to be an “expert” and I could have told them you don’t go anywhere without an offensive line.

Lovie Smith is basically an affirmative action hire, thanks to the Rooney Rule. How many Super Bowls have been won by coaches as laid-back as he is? I’m thinking “zero”. He’s in over his head. Nice guy, and I like him, but he’s not a good head coach.

Angelo was wrong about the QB being the chief problem to fix last off-season, which is being proven every Sunday. As GM, he is in charge of player personnel. He seems to suck at it. Which is a bit of a problem.

Their ownership and front office is a mess and has been for a long time.

Somehow they’ve been getting away with under-performing for years. The media and fan base is Bears-crazy, and often too close to the reality to assess it in a stone-cold sober state.

I’m just laying it out the way I see it. I hope they prove me wrong, and turn it around. But I’m not betting any serious money on that.

As a fan, I want to see Angelo and Smith gone, and a new regime based on a disciplined style. Like Singletary as coach and, I don’t know, Parcells as GM? Something like that. Football is not a business you can run with a Yale MBA, despite Michael McCaskey’s theories.

The popular perception is that the defense is talented, at least on the line and at linebacker (when healthy). And with Rod Marinelli in charge of the D-line now, that was supposed to fix issues with coaching. OK, so what is going on? Either they have been kidding themselves, or the “talent” is over-rated, or they aren’t trying very hard.

No matter how you slice all of this, there are serious failures at important spots throughout the organization.

…or Minnesota. I think they could be 7-1 with Sage Rosenfels back there…maybe 6-2.

How then do you explain the rapid rate of increase in government salaries?

Govt increase since 2000: $43k on a base of $76K. About 57%.

Private industry increase since 2000: $14K on a base of $45K. About 31%.

Did government workers suddenly become vastly more valuable relative to private industry?

Even more to the point, this rate of increase is unsustainable. It would bankrupt our country over time.

Think also about the huge bonuses paid to Freddie and Fannie by the corrupt clowns in Washington. For “performance”. Yeah, nice performance. Hundreds of millions of dollars, paid to crooks, and we’re left to bail out all those mortgages. I doubt that those are the only such examples of fraud. Maybe that type of thing is pushing these averages up.

Sure, there are valuable federal employees who do highly specialized work and deserve high salaries. There are also tens of thousands of unionized bureaucrats who do very little and make too much money.

No matter how you slice and dice this data, it is not a good thing to have the federal government’s average wages increase by 57% in just 8 years. Something is wrong there.

Again, the Federal Government does not hire too many burger-flippers or Wal-Mart greeters…does this chart only compare the same sets of employees to their counterparts in either world?

I would venture to guess that private industry COUNTERPARTS of Federal employees actually make more [i.e., private laywers v. federal lawyers; private physicians v. federal physicians].

I know that this is a knee-jerk bugaboo that all of us with the same political philosophy are supposed to embrace immediately [the fed employee as an overpaid do-nothing], but it does not hold up to scrutiny.

Because the government workforce doesn’t include many low-wage workers. Unless I’m mistaken, this is the entire federal workforce vs. the entire non-federal workforce, right? So no waitresses, fast-food employees, retail employees, etc. etc. This is not an apple-to-apple comparison…it’s an apple to apples/oranges/pears comparison.