I have long been concerned about the parasitic nature of government employees. There is nothing meritocratic about this group of people. Since there is no way for them to be fired and promotion is not based on productive output, their only contribution is based solely on seniority and academic records.
In the absence of output to measure, one may conclude that many government employees have a minimum competence, minimum drive and if they stay in the system, most achieve a static emotional life. Of course there are exceptions who love their work
I say all these bad things largely because I live in the city of San Francisco, that has 26,000 city employees, nearly all of whom are paid over $100,000 a year and who retire at levels equal to or exceeding that. This is far above the wage scale in the private sector in San Francisco.
Now I have in my hand the wage scale and actual wages for all California government employees. This list is shocking.
But first, a digression. Out of the 135 million people in the United States who are employed or do work of any sort, nearly 20 million of them work for the government. That is one out of six people.
In California there are 2.5 million government employees. Here is a list of their wages, including benefits. You will get to page 11 before you reach the salary and benefit level under $500,000 per year. That is nearly 700 California government employees receiving wages and benefits over half a million dollars.
At the city level, there are only five city employees in the state of California, who earned over half a million dollars a year.
On the same chart of city wages, you have to go 14 pages to find the first person who earns less than $300,000 a year. That is roughly 850 California city employees who earn between $300,000 and $500,000 in wages and benefits. The person who is listed for that first job under $300,000 is the chief financial officer in the suburban town of Palo Alto.
There is one reason for such a large number of highly paid people; it is the ability of unions to be exclusive bargaining agents for government employees and to simultaneously be able to extract dues from these employees to use in lobbying elected officials who set the wages.
I find it hard to be comfortable with these facts of life. We need government. But we don't need expensive, bloated and inefficient government.
I've demonstrated in several blogs that nearly all fire departments are three times larger than they need to be; police departments are equally excessive in size…. and the rest of most government agencies are bloated to levels that are unreasonable compared to other parts of the efficient world. There is no known mechanism forcing an efficient government output.
Time for action.