Oh, yes. We should all be happy that there are million dollar nurses, too. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-...ornia-s-struggle-to-reduce-payroll-costs.html Gov't employees are never greedy nor rent-seeking, and their pay and benefits are always well-earned and reasonable. Let's all repeat that mantra until we're thoroughly brainwashed!
One should not base one's opinion, or policy, on the exception, but rather on what is generally true.
Piezoe... do you really need any more details than... age 59 and 174 thousand a year? That is so absurd it should be designated proof of a large group criminal conspiracy. No state employee should make that much yet alone make it in retirement doing nothing. CA is broke and borrowing money to pay this guy. What more is there to know. he is 59 and walking proof of teacher fraud on the people.
I was Manager of Database Administration at a large bank in the late 1990âs. My group happened to be a part of modifying the payroll transaction system of which many school districts used our payroll because we managed the unions accounts. While discussing DB2 changes with a DBA working for me. He said â Boss you would not believe what I saw during testing (this test was done using production data). We did an SQL in testing for the teacherâs paycheck. It is a summary report on the line item amounts per pay check. WE multiplied by 12(Monthly) or 26Biweekly.â On this summary report for all the school districts the item that clearly stood out to me was total union dues collected... A few days later during a big important database reorganization that would take many hours. I stayed late to watch over it. This job was being done by the same DBA who I had chatted with about the teachers. He stated âI was poking around in accounts payable during my spare time. I was curious where all those union funds end up. â I lightly chastise him for doing those queries and reminded him that DBAâs are only concerned with database integrity and were not interested in content.â He said âI know that. But I was just looking to see where all that union money went. What I did was write a quick SQL to list the unions biggest payees. No biggee, but you still may want to take a peek at my summation SQL Group By query result just the same â¦.â I did look at his report because of my curiosity. It was not that many lines of output. It contained a summary list of the teacherâs union biggest payees. Most of the names I did not recognize until my voting district reps organization name came up on the list. There he was with a 6 figure number in the listing and campaign donation as reason under one of the codes⦠â It took my breath away for a second. I mumbled to myselfâ¦.So,⦠that is where all those teachers union dues are goingâ¦â Then the DBA stated his brilliant conclusion âBoss you and I are in the wrong business. I see no way you can lose an election if you got those education guys behind you. All you have to do is keep giving âem more pay and benefits each time you are elected and you got an elected job for life. Who is going to beat you with a war chest that big in each election? Hell, you could bribe each voter with a reasonable amount and still have a ton of funds left over. â So this simple story has to have been going on all over the country for decades. Public union buys politician. Bought politician rewards the pubic union. Then it starts over the next election. All these years these two have just sat back and assumed â⦠the public will Payâ¦â And now this is just one more of multitude of political promises that are coming due for these giant handouts and the money is just not there. Someday soon the locals, states and feds will max out their credit cards in America. When this happens politicians will be forced to finally rescind their false political handouts by finally going to a heavy austerity at all levels of government. At that time they will cut the current and future pay and benefits of all kinds of government workers to more realistic levels. I expect once this takes effect that the U.S. will look like a battle zone patterned after Greece that has become with continuous marches and strikes.
Sorry, I can't go along with your thinking on this. I don't trust the popular media as a source of accurate facts, nor do I trust them to give the whole picture even when their facts, as far as they go, are correct. I'd have to have much more information to draw any conclusion.
That is just an excuse. We all know govt workers making six figures. We all know that many get to calculate their retirements off their last few years of earnings. Which is why they look for serious over time or feign injury so they can turn their retirement income into tax free disabliity. You do not need to live in CA or other jacked liberal states long to know that there are teachers and principles all around us making six figures. Cops and fireman as well. There is a little scam where govt workers claim a messed up back or some injury in the last year before they retire and then their retirements become disability and they get them tax free.
US will have a very hard time to ever get to scandinavian government (relatively low) debt levels - I'm a bit lazy to doucle check but whereas those countries have strong socialist inspiration, I doubt their civil servants get such ridiculously high salaries and subsequent pensions as related by the OP.. Besides I checked recently the case of Sweden as Stockholm is one of the cities where I wouldn't mind moving and taxation is not repulsive for people living mostly off their capital: 30% tax on capital gains No wealth tax No gift tax No estate tax
Interesting link below, first check the difference between CIA and IMF estimations of US debt levels , than compare with Scandinavian countries... incidentally those countries are commonly referred as the most succesful instances of european style social democracies - although Switzerland could probably match them. I doubt that US way of life is as sustainable as scandinavian countries'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_public_debt