This seems like a purposely obtuse hit on California by someone with a political axe to grind. Before the pandemic and global recession which has blown up State and Federal budgets everywhere, California was running a huge budget surplus and saving up billions of dollars in a rainy-day fund.
Deeply red Georgia is also facing a major budget shortfall but you don't see article like this from right-wing commentors lamenting the series of tax cuts passed in recent years.
As a California tax payer, I appreciate these sunshine reports. Calling them a hit piece reveals you too have some sort of bias or axe to grind.
Government work was supposed to be fairly compensated with pension and benefits, while avoiding the instability risks of the private sector. Now we are told it has all the stability plus super generous pensions and salary that would make the best workers in the private sector jealous.
It reveals the obscene corruption of our political class runs through the entire system.
> Calling them a hit piece reveals you too have some sort of bias or axe to grind.
No, because it is, in fact, a hit piece. Were it, instead, an attempt to provide a useful picture on which people could form an informed understanding, here are things it would provide information on that it does not:
* What proportion of the surveyed workforce does this over-$100k population represent,
* How does the pay of the highlighted population compare to that of private sector and/or other-state employees doing similar work with similar qualifications.
This doesn't even rise to the level of cherry picking facts to paint a biased narrative, since there isn't even a narrative here. It's cherry-picking decontextualized factoids to provoke a emotional reaction.
> Now we are told it has all the stability plus super generous pensions and salary that would make the best workers in the private sector jealous.
$100k salary plus public sector benefits wouldn't make the best workers in the private sector jealous.
A lot for this is public agency CEOs and other executives making quite a lot for generic “workers” but much less than private sector executives,and public sector workforces being management heavy because a lot of the operations are contracted out.
And the isolated unique individuals which are pointed to, there's consistently no analysis or explanation of the specific circumstances producing the unusually high compensation. And that's because if they did that, it would undercut the emotional response the entire piece is careful geared to provoke by avoiding context.
“ Now we are told it has all the stability plus super generous pensions and salary that would make the best workers in the private sector jealous.”
Well, considering that most private sector workers don’t have pensions anymore, it probably would make them jealous. In the private sector they’ve all been replaced with 401ks and maybe a feeble matching of a few thousand dollars from your employer.
The way I look at it is, public sector jobs are probably what private sector jobs in America would look like if employee compensation didn’t divorce productivity gains starting in the 1980s. Which is why they look so generous by comparison.
And is this rainy-day fund working? I am seeing that the human feces pickup-patrol in SF is costing taxpayers up to $184k each and SF is becoming an even worse homeless-friendly dump with California's extreme liberal policies.
Homeless people don't aggregate in cities like SF because they have liberal policies. They aggregate in cities like SF because they are dense. Cities also tend to be liberal, but correlation != causation.
> Homeless people don't aggregate in cities like SF because they have liberal policies.
Insofar as not actively and often illegally shipping them out is a progressive policy (and considering what lots of other cities do, it is), they do exactly for that reason, since it results in them having an unbalanced inflow from places that do engage in such practices.
Even beyond that, insofar as SF’s progressive policies toward the homelessness increase the survivability of homelessness more than they get people out of it, they probably, simply by that means, increase aggregation of the homeless in the city. A less progressive policy aimed at maximizing homeless misery and reducing survivability of homelessness would reduce the aggregation of homeless in the city.
Not sure if facetious, but this appears generally true on the face of it. They had a $21B surplus last year, and COVID has decimated state tax incomes across the board. Post-COVID, it should be expected that they'll be just fine. I agree with GP that this just feels like a hit piece.
As much as I don't like many aspects of CA government and politics, this feels like a weird attack. I cannot comment on exact specifics but a lot of those salaries don't seem super outrageous when you look at the areas they serve. Thats part of the problem going on right now no? How can you expect to hire public servants when you cannot even pay them enough to live in the areas they are serving?
This isn't just about public servants. The article mentions a truck driver working for the state and making 160k, a lifeguard making 365k, and a nurse making 500k.
Truck driver and lifeguard are low skill occupations. These individuals could easily be replaced by someone just as competent for a third of the cost. Nursing is not low skill, but 500k is more than most software engineers, other engineers, bankers, and white collar professionals make. It's completely excessive.
I'm not really sure the context, but due to the context of the article, I have a feeling the titles of these jobs are somewhat misleading. Perhaps it's not someone who just drives trucks being called a "truck driver", but someone in charge of a truck driving fleet? And maybe it's not just a "lifeguard", but someone who manages beach safety for some popular beaches? Some of these people need to be paid a lot for the system to work, especially if they're coordinating things.
If we could see what they actually do, day-to-day, then I think I can understand better what's going on. I don't see these details here.
I have a feeling that if you dig into it, there's nothing here. Otherwise I think we would see the article actually dig into it.
Through just a cursory reading of who's getting P-P-P-PAID,
- 109,627 teachers and school administrators.
- 66,403 college and university employees.
- 62,204 State of California employees – including a nurse.
- 45,718 city and town employees: including 1,420 municipal administrators and employees who out-earned the California governor – the highest paid state governor ($202,000).
Notably we have teachers, college and uni employees (not sure of the % of admin vs educators here), and state employees (not sure of the admin vs essential workers here as well, whatever the definition of essential)
And they name-and-shame some of these employees as well.
What's the matter here? Bloated admin costing money? or competition costing money? The article attributes it to both.
So why shouldn't the gov. workers get paid? Singapore does that (but they actually have a functional gov.).
But paying gov/school/college workers well has got to be a good thing! Incentivizing them/others to strive to do a better job/game whatever metric to get that job, which cannot be entirely corrupt.
There's a nurse in there well.
California does not seem to be in trouble because of these people who are highly paid.
Let's be clear: the author is a political activist running a 501c3 (non-profit charity) that seems to believe the problems are pensions and payment, and writes not a single sentence about the cost of housing. In fact, their organization is not focused on California, but on draining "the swamp" and is basically doxxing public servants.
From my point of view, this guy is basically paid to support the Republican party by attacking the incomes of public servants who largely donate to Democratic candidates. Hence the absense of any real analysis of what drives costs and a focus on 'unfunded pension liabilities' and big numbers designed to incite rather than inform.
> California is grasping to find a patsy to blame.
Well the author here is using decontextualized factoids to paint a politically-motivated emotional picture of what to blame. I don't see a lot of evidence that California is grasping to find a patsy, either in this direction or any other.
I don't think we should be paying football coaches that much, but I don't think the majority of other positions are overpaid to the degree the author asserts/implies. Especially individuals in education, considering we have millions of school age children.
Something else that annoys me in media in general is hyperfocusing on government liabilities (pensions, projects where existing bonds aren't sufficient, etc) as unfunded, while ignoring unpaid individual liabilities (credit card debt, car loans, student loans, mortgages, etc), that are also unfunded. I think we should start referring to all future financial obligations as unfunded liabilities, unless there's already a framework in place to ensure future funds are available for them.
I especially look forward to Tom Selleck saying that reverse mortgages aren't a way for the bank to take your house, they're just a way for the bank to make your unfunded liabilities worse. :)
I don’t understand what’s wrong with paying teachers and city managers well. Especially in a county like Santa Clara, the cost of housing is driven up by tech, so of course salaries are higher.
This strikes me as an attempt to nationalize the issue, since these numbers are more eye-popping in the rest of the country.
Public (especially the state and municipal) employees in the US earn quite a lot of money. In an NJ town right across Manhattan, I know a town council man could make $150K/year. He has been on the council for like only a few years (like 2-3 years top), but before then he was running all kinds of political stuff in the city (once an assistant of the then mayor, for example). I can't help but imagine corruption when I saw how much he earns and how much property tax we have to pay in this town.
P.S. I got to learn his income because I am on the board of a co-op where he tried to buy an apartment (his secondary dwelling) at and we run his background check and income/finance capability.
On one hand, this doesn’t bother me much. California is very expensive and wages are very high - these two things are related. In general I think public employees making wages comparable to private sector is a good thing.
On the other hand, if all the city staff people had to live on $67k/yr (the median household income in CA), then perhaps we would make more progress addressing the cost of living.
Deeply red Georgia is also facing a major budget shortfall but you don't see article like this from right-wing commentors lamenting the series of tax cuts passed in recent years.