Comment by callmeed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by callmeed | Hacker News Reader

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"groups which have essentially captured the state and municipality budgeting processes voted themselves large increases in benefits ..."

By "groups", you mean "politicians, government employees, and unions" right?

- California teachers and school employees are the highest paid in the nation. 35% above the national average.

- State employees make about 35% more than private-sector employees

- An enormous pension problem for government employees. A public-safety worker can retire at age 55 with 90% of his/her salary. The result: $65B in upcoming, unfunded pension liability. My father-in-law is a retired probation officer. He does consulting for his county and pulls a pension check–basically working part-time and pulling 1.5 salaries.

- The state spends 70% more (per capita) than the national average on social services, primarily because of it's welfare programs.

Funny story: I worked at a CA community college for a few years while still in college. Just special programming projects and IT stuff. When I quit to pursue my first startup, I got a letter letting me know I had $2,000 in a PERS retirement account. As much as I enjoyed cashing it out for our startup, it just shows how reckless CA is with spending and obligations to these groups.

Don't think all this is because of a lack of income either. State personal income tax is really high. Part of the reason we left 2 years ago.

Agreed. I run the IT dept. for an agency that provides mental health services to abused and neglected children. The program qualifies for "cost reimbursement". That means every supply given to our Mental Health program (pencils, computers, etc...) is billed right back to the state who then pays us the exact amount back. All you have to do is prove the supply went to Mental Health staff.

A couple years ago our Therapists complained that all the other agencies had LCD monitors and they didn't (this was back when LCDs were still relatively expensive). I tried to stop the purchase but the truth was they were right, the state would pay no matter what and every other agency like ours HAD bought their staff new LCD monitors.

In the end we spent about $15,000 of state money replacing monitors and ended up throwing out CRT monitors that were only 1 or 2 years old (and which the state had also paid for). Worse there are about 8,000 agencies like ours in California and they all did the same thing.

- State employees make about 35% more than private-sector employees

I'd like to know how they came up with those numbers, care to reference?

"But the latest U.S. Census survey, from 2007, shows the average annual salary of California state government employees was $53,958, compared with $40,991 for the average private-sector worker."

source: http://seekingalpha.com/article/153159-california-s-pension-...

which is actually more like 31.6% higher ... sorry, bad head-math

Private sector jobs include all the minimum wage stuff which have no benefits. Even Steve Jobs only makes $1 a year, those types of pay packages skew the results as well. It would be more interesting to see averages segmented by job categories.

Many public sector jobs have a market rate barely above minimum wage [1], but actually cost far more thanks to public sector unions.

I don't know about California, but I know that NYC MTA garbage collectors (job: taking garbage out of the subway) make about $50-60k and gets to retire after 20 years of work.

[1] Very few people, even highly unskilled workers, earn minimum wage. Market rate tends to be higher.

[edit: to clarify, by "taking garbage out of the subway", I mean taking the trash bags out of the garbage cans and bringing them to the dumpster, sweeping, picking up refuse, etc. In the private sector, this does not cost $50-60k. I'm not talking about track work.]

One point, garbage collection is a risky job and there is a substantial risk premium built into the salary.

Given the observed difference between the salary of a (unionized) school janitor and a (non-unionized) cleaning crew worker for a hotel, whose job duties are essentially identical, I can only assume that either a) unions kill more people than cancer or b) that there is another factor at play besides risk premiums.

http://www.sacbee.com/737/v-print/story/1917289.html

The Sancramento Bee asked the government for salary data and then did some number crunching. The average public sector employee, excluding the university system, made $68k (median: $66k).

The Bureau of Labor Statistics and other federal bodies maintain average wage stats for all states which should be comparable to those numbers. In California, the statewide average wage is $48k, the median about $36k.

If you want to spend some time doing your own stats analysis of how much pay is for "comparable" jobs across the two sectors, a) it will be tough -- "comparable worth" is a very subjective notion b) you'll have one of the best linkbait ideas of the century and c) expect death threats.

Using the quote like that makes it sound like a state employee doing the same job as a private employee will get paid 35% more, but that is far from the truth.

Different people doing different jobs get paid differently, that's about all those statistics say.

".. but that is far from the truth."

Are you sure it's far from the truth?

It's probably hard to compare, but look at clerical job openings (something that requires no college degree) at a university or public agency office with those in the private sector.

Maybe comparable jobs aren't always 35% higher, but I think you'll find they are consistently higher

Absolutely on the money. These are the fruits of rosy-eyed welfare policy: rampant poverty, fiscal collapse, the poor get poorer and the middle class? What middle class?

>and the middle class? What middle class?

I'm the type to prefer the government stay out of my money and personal business, but let's get real here. The greatest expansion of the middle class in American history (late 1950s) occurred at a time when the top tax bracket was 90%.

They just knew better than to blow all the money like California did :P

The expansion of the middle class has nothing to do with the top tax bracket. It has to do with industrialization before automation (lots of low/medium skill jobs that provided significant value), and the destruction of competition around the world.

Speaking more seriously, I'm pretty certain the expansion of the middle class was due to strong white labor unions and Fordism as a cultural subtype within Modernism.

This entailed many things, with which the top tax bracket had little to no relevance.

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