By John Seiler

Ever wonder what government workers think of their gigantic pay, perks, pleasures and pensions? All paid for by IRS-strangled taxpayers, of course.

Wonder no more. A top-ranked government official has written this little ditty to explain it all for you:

Of all the 50 states, California’s government workers make the highest pay, averaging $5,774 a month in March 2010, according to U.S. Census data. That works out to $69,288 a year.

Local government workers in Washington, D.C., made a little more, at $5,990. But D.C. gets vast funding from federal taxpayers, part of the $4,000,000,000,000.00 of our tax dollars that sluices through D.C.

For the 50 states and local governments, although a lot of federal money is involved, most money is grabbed from state citizens. No wonder California taxpayers are whacked at among the highest rates in the country.

And what do we show for it? Although unemployment has improved, it’s still the second worst in the country, behind Nevada.

Our schools commonly rank 48th of the states on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests.

Median income in California crashed 9 percent from 2006 to 2010, nearly double the 5 percent annual rate.

The roads are falling apart. The infrastructure is dilapidated. The state can’t solve its Delta water problems.

Yet the bureaucrats who run the whole shebang — mainly run it into the ground — are getting paid more than those in any other state.

If California were a private-sector company, it long ago would have gone bankrupt, its profitable parts, if any, sold off to the highest bidder.

But because so many people believe the fiction that government is somehow “different,” that it’s really all of “us” working “together,” this expensive, dysfunctional monstrosity continues to tax and regulate us to death — while being paid excessively.

A good example of the dysfunction is firefighters, who top the pay list in California at $9,774 per month on average, or $117,288 a year. Yet firefighting easily could privatized everywhere, or turned over to volunteer fire departments.

That’s unlikely to happen because the “people” don’t run California, the government-worker unions do. The unions force massive dues from their “members,” then use the money to get their bought politicians to pilfer the pockets of taxpayers at record levels. Not only that, but the unions have run up pension benefits $500 billion beyond the state’s current ability to pay.

Instead of trying to raise taxes $7 billion, as Gov. Jerry Brown wants, he should be cutting the massive pay, perks and pensions of government workers. The state just can’t afford it anymore. Common citizens — the private sector — are broke and suffering. The slaves can’t take any more lashes across their backs.

Feb. 7, 2012

Incredible. Even after all that has been revealed about the immense government-worker pay, perks and pensions that have bankrupted California state and local governments, more shocking revelations keep coming up. This is from today’s L.A. Times:

Managers in California’s government routinely ignore official limits on the number of vacation days their employees can save, compelling the state to cut huge checks — many worth six figures — for unused time off when workers retire.

Prison doctor Fong Lai received $594,976 when he retired in 2010. Like most state employees, Lai was supposed to bank no more than 80 days of vacation, but his payment represented more than 2 1/2 years of unused time off.

Jay Wickizer, an administrator for the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, saved about the same number of days, resulting in a $294,440 check upon his retirement last year. Former parole agent Thomas Berns accrued nearly three years’ worth of time off, allowing him a $268,990 cash-out, state records show.

Such payouts are almost unheard of in the private sector. Most companies allow employees to accrue a few weeks of vacation, but after that it’s “use it or lose it,” said Steven Frates, research director of Pepperdine University’s Davenport Institute on public policy. “The theory behind vacations, of course, is rest and recuperation and recharge.”

But there’s never any rest for those who abuse the system and the taxpayers who pay for it.

On the Internet Front Page today for the Times, just below the link to the above scandal story, is a link to a Michael Hiltzik story entitled, “Hiltzik: Public pension reform, not public-worker bashing.”

He writes:

we’ll never achieve an equitable and effective fix until we dispel the miasma of non-facts enveloping this highly fraught topic.

For example, are public employees better paid than their private-sector fellows? Some are and some aren’t. A study done for the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility, which is pushing pension reforms, found that public workers at the low end of the income scale were better paid than private-sector workers in similar jobs. But it was the opposite for those in management and specialized occupations, such as computer science.

Well, obviously Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and that Facebook kid make more money than any computer geek in government. And high-level managers in any 500 Fortune company are going to make seven-figure salaries. Such numbers skew the averages in the comparison.

Yet government workers still, on average, make more.  Federal government workers make twice what their private-sector counterparts make, on average, reported USA Today last August.

And in California, according to a study released last October by U.C. Berkeley, state and local workers make up to 30 percent more than equivalent private-sector workers.

Especially in the past 20 years, the government system simply has gotten way out of hand. The government-worker unions are the most powerful force in any state that allows them collective bargaining. They run things. And they have run the costs of employing them as high as they could until taxpayers collapsed from the burden.

May 15, 2011