The real battle of the next 20 years will not be against Jihadists, Communism in Latin or South America or even Liberals versus Conservatives. It WILL be the battle of the Public Sector versus the Private sector. Why? The public sector has been on a wild binge of runaway salary and pension spending - and has conveniently mailed the bill to us and our children.
Sure the Public Employee Unions and the grand daddy of this problem - former Governor Jerry Brown -are trying their best to play the Jedi mind trick on all of us. They mumble “These are not the Government Droids you are looking for“. They want us to focus on anything but their hideous records of bloated civil service spending and pension contracts. It would be great to review Brown’s records as governor to see what he actually did - but hey- he took the unusual step of writing a law just before he left to seal his records for 50 years – until 2038 !
The reality though - is that there are way too many government workers and they are paid way too much.
Professor Paul Light of NYU –calculated that the size of just the Federal Civil service as a sum of Civil Service employees, (1.9m) military personnel,(1.4m) government contractors,(7.8m) grant jobs( 2.9m) and Postal Service employees (.7m). All of those add up to 14.6 million federal workers. That’s just the Federal Government. We have State, County and local government to add to that number.
Then there is the income disparity between the Public and the private sector. If you measure the average Salary between the two – you see that the average federal worker receives $79k and the average salaried private sector worker just $50k annually. When you compare total compensation it gets worse. The average bureaucrat gets $119k a year and the private employee $69k. That means the government bureaucrats make almost twice as much per year as the people paying their salaries.
At the California State level the average government worker makes 45% more per hour than their private sector counterpart. To make it worse State Government workers often retire at age 55 on full pensions that run for3 to 4 decades at full pay and benefits. These unbelievably great pensions are time bombs, as the same government weasels that brought them to us have consistently underfunded the pension funds. The current forecast of just how much the State of California public pension fund is “underfunded” is 535 billion dollars.
Don’t forget – it was Jerry Brown that did this to us in his first regime as governor in the 70’s.
Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown, when Governor of California in 1978, signed the “Dill Act" which gave California public employees the right to collective bargaining. That’s when this monstrosity of a problem started. He did it again as the Oakland Mayor, and as Attorney General has been so cozy with all four of the public employee unions - that they have dumped multi millions of dollars of grateful cash in his election deposit box.
Jerry Brown empowered the Unions grip on the system - making it virtually impossible to fire government bureaucrats. As an example, the Los Angeles Union School District has only tried to fire 7 teachers in the last 10 years. Of this miniscule number, they succeeded in only getting 4 of the worst burnouts you can imagine fired. The price tag? $3.6 million to terminate 4 bad teachers. The US Bureau of Labor statistics show that involuntary termination rates in the private sector are over 6 times as high as federal or state government workers.
To sum it up, Jerry Brown created the network of Government Unions that hired far too many public employees; made sure they got paid way too much, and made them impossible to get rid of.
And 50% of Californians are cheering him on to be Governor again? Which half? The Government half or the private sector half? Which side are you on?
For fun, check out this Saturday Night Live Skit which parodies this very situation. http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/public-employee-of-the-year/1222306
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