California taxpayers reading this Weblog will appreciate the following links from a reader…
The first is an article about a disabled California Highway Patrol retiree who collects over $100,000 per year as a disability pension and “was hired by the federal government to be security director at San Francisco International Airport” (2007 followup).
The second is a Sacramento Bee tool for searching state employee salaries. Pick an agency and then click “search” and the top-paid workers are displayed. Selecting “California Highway Patrol”, for example, brings up a sergeant earning $304,477 per year. When you reflect that the average worker’s pension is approximately the same cost as his or her salary (using realistic assumptions about investment returns and the likely life expectancy of someone who comfortably retires to the golf course at age 50), this is an entire page of state workers who are being given more than $500,000 per year in total compensation. The pension system itself is apparently hugely expensive to run, with plenty of workers there earning over $300,000 per year. Fish and Game are cheaper, with only 4.5 pages of people being paid more than $95,000 per year (plus pension obligations of at least another $95,000, for a total of $190,000/year if compared to a private industry salary).
The federal government’s unbridled spending isn’t too surprising because the feds have printing presses for creating additional dollars. States that pay policemen $600,000 per year (including pension commitments) strike me as odd. Where did they think the money would come from?
it’s ok. They’ll be making $500,000USD then, which will have the buying power of a warm bucket of spit once the govt. prints enough dollars to inflate their debt into meaninglessness.
Michael: I think you’ll find that public employee pensions, unlike their private sector counterparts, are adjusted automatically for inflation. Should the U.S. economy slide backwards, for example, a retired public employee might end up being legally entitled to a pension 5-10X that of the average worker’s salary (already, of course, a lot of retired California state workers get far more than the average California non-retired private sector worker).
hahhahah I bet you’re right. ahahah oh my.
I should (for real) advise my mech engg sister, recently laid off, to find a job, any job, in govt.