How Public Servants Became our Masters

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How Public Servants Became our Masters - 1/16/2010 10:39:13 AM

TheHeretic

Posts: 19100
Joined: 3/25/2007
From: California, USA
Status: offline

Here's an interesting article, looking at one of the time bombs ticking away on our economy, and the ability of government to do what they are supposed to do.

The average federal salary (including benefits) is set to grow from $72,800 in 2008 to $75,419 in 2010, CBS reported. But the real action isn’t in what government employees are being paid today; it’s in what they’re being promised for tomorrow. Public pensions have swollen to unrecognizable proportions during the last decade. In June 2005, BusinessWeek reported that “more than 14 million public servants and 6 million retirees are owed $2.37 trillion by more than 2,000 different states, cities and agencies,” numbers that have risen since then. State and local pension payouts, the magazine found, had increased 50 percent in just five years.

These huge pension increases have eaten away at public finances, most spectacularly in California, where a bipartisan bill that passed virtually without debate unleashed the odious “3 percent at 50” retirement plan in 1999. Under this plan, at age 50 many categories of public employees are eligible for 3 percent of their final year’s pay multiplied by the number of years they’ve worked. So if a police officer starts working at age 20, he can retire at 50 with 90 percent of his final salary until he dies, and then his spouse receives that money for the rest of her life.

It is a three page article, but I did manage to find the 'single page' button for the link.

I have two suggestions for getting this problem under control. The first ain't likely, the second is pretty radical change at a fundamental level.

To start with, we need to ban public employee unions. The conditions of employment that the government applies to private employers should damn well be good enough for those who live off their sweat. We can certainly tinker around with advisory commissions, and boards of review, and all manner of ways to address grievances, but the union is GONE.

If we really want to cure the disease, instead of just treating the worst of the symptoms, I think we need to fundamentally alter where our public servants come from. Mandatory national service. We replace the spoiled and bloated employment rolls with draftees, from the federal level, all the way down to a community services district. Patching potholes, administering the DMV eye test, writing parking tickets, guarding prison inmates... These aren't high skill jobs. It won't cover every job we need covered, but a barracks full of young people performing their national service is going to be a hell of a lot cheaper than what we are doing.

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