When I was a managing editor of a newspaper we would often, during economic downturns, save by attrition, meaning that we just wouldn’t replace retiring employees or those who left for other jobs. The advantage was having to lay off fewer people when the ax fell, but the disadvantage was having fewer people to get the job done. But that was what the situation called for, so we managed by cutting out some things and focusing on the essentials until things got better.

It never occurs to government, at any level, to save by attrition. To a bureaucrat everything is essential, every job is sacrosanct, no savings are possible without harming “the mission.” Only the most dire of economic circumstances can get government to even make a nod at using token layoffs or furloughs, before raising taxes, of course.

The federal government has just announced that it will need to hire 270,000 employees to replace aging-out Boomers who will be retiring in the next few years. Here’s an idea: Just don’t replace them, or most of them. Here’s another idea: Try managing. Get creative and find a way to do with less. People in the private sector, and families, too, do it all the time.

Regular people, the kind that don’t usually get involved in protests, are finally coming to the realization that something is terribly wrong with government. Daniel Henninger has a piece today on just that phenomenon, and finds it’s global. It’s not just happening in your capital city or at your congressman’s town hall meeting:

What accounts for the global electorate’s growing disgust with the political overclass? Try this: No matter the ideological cast of these governments, they all hold in common one policy: the inexorable upward march of national indebtedness. It has arrived at the edge of the cliff.

To all elected officials and appointed bureaucrats, what’s happening around the country should remind them of one of Kurt Russell’s lines in the great movie “Tombstone”: