When was the last time you met a public employee who you thought - WOW - this person should be getting a $10 million guaranteed pension, with no health care cost, not have to pay into social security, car allowance, etc. The answer to the rhetorical question is NEVER!!!
Thom is a thoughtful person but he's missing the point on government salaries. There are over 1,000,000 federal employees who received over $100,000 as a bonus - (and that doesn't include any of the treasury or national security employees). ARE YOU KIDDING ME???
The issue of multimillion dollar golden parachutes for government employees whether at the Federal, State or local level is one of our greatest problems. Thom states that private sector pay hasn't maintained pace. While this is true, the problem of the ruling oligarchy is that when you have the ruling elite in government, in regulatory position - i.e. people who make six figures a year with no health care cost, no retirement cost & multimillion dollar golden parachutes for being a civil servant - the system WILL NEVER CHANGE cause those who are responsible for regulation, enforcement and change have ever incentive to maintain the status quo stealing money from the public commons.
Then there's the simple MATH. When you do the MATH, and I mean simple MATH, it is NOT substainable to continue to payout so many multimillion dollar public employee golden parachutes. If we limited public employee salaries to $100,000, made them part of the social security system & put a lifetime cap on pensions of $1,000,000 - that would fix the vast majority of local, county and state budget deficits.
I ran the numbers for my City, my County (which is Los Angeles) and my state - and we would actually have a surplus on every level if we did that.
In addition, if you wanted to fix Wall Street today, switch everyone at the SEC, in Congress and in the Senate to 401(k) plans that MUST be 100% invested in stocks - any stocks. You'd see the up tick rule, Glass-Segal returned before the end of business. You'd see credit default swaps and 40:1 leverage gone before LUNCH! Thoughts,
Comments
How do you jump from 100k salary to a multimillion salary? $100k is a fraction of a miilion. I doubt these upper level managers have free health care - I am sure they have payroll deductions and co-pays like everyone else who can afford healthcare. Again, I am not sure how these managers escape the social security system - even if they are private contractors they would still have self-employment social security tax.
On the other hand I agree with the thought behind the whole post. Too many governments and their managers are being 'run like a business'. Governments have always been doing accounting and being audited - the new addition is the idea of profiting from government and some of these compensation packages are way out of line. I bet you could find alot more waste and even true fraud in privatization contracts.
So with a $100,000 pension and a one million dollar cap they would recieve their pension for 10 yrs? Then what?
I agree with the sentiments but not the solution.
The average top 10% make above $250,000K - the average retirement payments to these top 10% of government employees is $300,000 so every decade of retirement they get $3,000,000. And YES - they make more annually in retirement than they did in their job.
Since the average age of retirement for top level management of government employees is 56 and the average life expectancy of this income level is into their 90s - then $3 million x 4 decades is a $12 million guaranteed retirement package. The top 20% of public employees in California from the City to the County to the State level pay ZERO in health care expenses - no copay, no deductibles - ZERO!!!! In addition, they don't pay SSI, their respective government agencies pay into a private SSI which was set up just for government employees. If the public truly understood what was going on with the top level public employees - there would be a revolt. Check out the City of Bell in the Los Angeles Times - it will blow your mind when you realize that's the NORM!!!