The idea that all public sector workers are effectively a black hole into which money is thrown and nothing of benefit to the economy or society is returned is hogwash.
For example, I was chatting earlier today with my friend and local government employee (I'm private sector by the way) and he was showing me an email he'd just sent to a local councillor. The email concerned a complaint by a member of the public who was annoyed that a road which previously had a speed limit of 30mph had been changed to 20mph and that various road 'humps' had been installed. The person in question had written to her local councillor complaining that this 'traffic calming' scheme was hindering her journey to work and was a waste of public money (it was installed in 2008 so it had taken this person 3 years to put pen to paper for some reason). The councillor in turn had written to my mate who runs the road safety section at my local council and asked him why the scheme had been constructed.
It turns out that the project cost approximately £70,000. Sounds like a lot of money doesn't it? Except when you see the benefits. In 2004 the accident figures (taken over a ten year average) for this stretch of road were annually - 2 deaths, 23 accidents resulting in serious injuries and 39 other accidents resulting in minor injuries. The scheme was constructed in 2008 and the reported figures for 2010 (as an annual average) were – 0 deaths, 5 accidents resulting in serious injuries and 17 other accidents resulting in minor injuries.
According to DfT's figures, each death costs the tax payer £1,600,000, a serious injury, £180,000 and a minor injury, £14,000.
This means that before the scheme was implemented, each year the cost to the taxpayer due to accidents was £7,886,000. Afterwards it was £1,138,000. That's a saving of £6,748,000 per year. That's quite a considerable return for a £70,000 investment. To put it further into context, my mate (who is a chartered Civil Engineer) earns about £36,000. He runs a small team of people – 4 in total who each earn about £25,000 each (rough estimate). That's a total salary outlay for the local authority of approximately £136,000. I make that £70,000 plus £136,000 equals £206,000 per year to save almost £7 million per year - on one scheme alone! And they do two or three of these schemes every year.
That is just one example of the public sector saving the public purse millions of pounds. Let's not forget that my mate and all of his colleagues pay tax and national insurance as well.
More importantly, let's not forget that since this scheme was implemented on this stretch of road, not one person has been killed since 2008.