Sig, what is outrageous is that Illinois has no way of actually paying for these pensions. The State has been downgraded 21 times since 2009, and this is all driven by the pension crisis. The answer from Illinois politicians continues to be more tax hikes. But Illinois is losing residents and businesses at an alarming rate. You talk about what is a fair wage. The Illinois Policy Institute claims that Illinois State Workers are the highest paid State workers in the US when adjusted for each State's Cost-of-living Index. https://www.illinoispolicy.org/reports/illinois-state-workers-highest-paid-in-nation/ I personally have absolutely NO problem with the average Illinois State worker pay level of $59K. But if you want to continue with your assertion that paying School District Superintendents $330K per year and small local government executives and small town managers $250K per year is necessary - I would strongly beg to differ. I pulled this from an October 2019 article from the Chicago Tribune: "Real estate professionals like Tom Keefe, owner of Keefe Real Estate in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, have noticed an influx of Chicago residents moving to The Badger State for a number of reasons, but the lower tax burden seems to trump them all. “For the same size house in Illinois, taxes are triple and quadruple what they are in Wisconsin. And a lot of people think the services here are just as good, if not better, particularly when it comes to schooling,” he said."
So a school district superintendent is tasked with 75-100,000 students, around 5,000 teachers and a couple thousand other employees, and a budget north of a billion dollars a year. I make a hell of a lot more than they do, and I'm responsible for far far less on every metric. Someone tasked with that level of responsibility at any private sector company would certainly be making north of that, heck most of the full professors at my grad school university were at that level and they just had the PhD and a fraction of the responsibility. Can IL pay for it or not is a valid question, but I don't think it's at all an unrealistic salary given the level of the job. As I think we've discussed before, it's important to realize that pension tails come from being one of the major drivers of U.S. GDP for the past 100 years. FL doesn't don't have them, for example, not necessarily because they're so much better at controlling cost but because when all the folks in IL now earning pensions were cranking out GDP, FL was cranking out oranges and not much else. It's more a case of the boomers not paying into the pensions and screwing us as they did with everything else than the pensions themselves being unreasonable (aside from the overtime trick that I think is BS).
There is a simple solution to this problem. Suggest to your civil engineer friend that he try to get a job as a garbage truck driver. That way he can make more money.
I shudder think what many of these employees do in an eight hour day. I suspect a typical goes like this: 9:30 - 10:00: Arrive at work an hour late. 10:00 - 11:00: Check org email, check social media messages, reply to both. 11:00 - 1:00: Lunch. 1:00 - 2:00: Attend org meetings. 2:00 - 3:00: Read and reply to org emails, and social media messages. 3:00 - 3:30: Break. 3:30 - 4:00: Read and reply to org emails, and social media message. 4:00: Leave for the day to beat rush hour traffic. How can I get one of those sweet Illinois state jobs?
Again, do you seriously think the schoold superintendent tasked with 75-100,000 students, around 5,000 teachers and a couple thousand other employees, and a budget north of a billion dollars a year is doing anything like that? I mean seriously, did you just pull all that out your ass then convince yourself that it was somehow fact because you had written it down?
Meanwhile years ago Boeing moved their HQ to Illinois from state of Washington. CEO during 737 Max debacle was shown the door but not before he walked away into retirement with $28+ million. Public private same difference. And before anyone says public is taxpayer money. We, all of us, pay for the incompetence, greed and fraud of others wherever it takes place.
They won't let you in. It's all family and friends watching each others back. Not like you can argue over whose qualifications are better in an interview.
Of course not. There is a bit of sarcasm in my post. However, there is some truth in sarcasm. Do you think if auditors observed anonymously, they wouldn't find a couple of instances of what I wrote?
Absolutely. As they would at any corporation in America (or anywhere else in the world for that matter)