Taxpayers vs Bureaucrats, Part XLI

I’ve avoided this topic in recent weeks because it’s too depressing, but this story is too outrageous to ignore. The County of Los Angeles has 199 bureaucrats who “earned” more than $250,000 last year. According to Census Bureau data for 2008, the median household income in the county was 55,000, Here’s a blurb from the L.A.Times about incomes of the bureaucratic gilded class.

Nearly 200 Los Angeles County employees earned more than a quarter of a million dollars in 2009, according to a list of the county’s top earners released late Monday in response to a Public Records Act request from The Times. The highest earners list was dominated by physicians and other medical personnel, but also included county firefighters and a handful of top sheriff’s employees. Some of the best-known names on the list belong to elected officials — although none of the five county supervisors, who make $178,789 a year, qualified. …The Times requested the base salary, overtime and “other earnings” for county employees whose total annual pay exceeded $250,000. “Other earnings” can include bonuses for special skills or responsibilities or unused benefits cashed out as taxable income, among other things. …Overtime played a big role, with only 65 people making the list on base salary alone. Thirty workers made more than $80,000 in overtime. Twenty-two of them work for the county Fire Department, four work for public hospitals, two were psychiatrists for the Mental Health Department, and two were physician specialists for the Sheriff’s Department.

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Would You Trade Higher Taxes for Much Lower Spending and Less Red Tape?

I hate taxes more than anyone, but other policies matter as well, so if I had the choice of replacing current government policies with the ones that existed at the end of the Clinton years, I would gladly make that trade. Yes, it would mean higher tax rates, but it also would mean slashing government spending from 24 percent of GDP down to 18 percent of GDP. It would mean no sleazy TARP bailout, no Sarbanes-Oxley red tape, and no added power and authority for the federal government.

This is the argument that I made in this interview on CNBC, though my opponent tried to do his version of the Brezhnev Doctrine (what’s mine is mine, what’s yours is negotiable), so I concluded the interview by stating that in the real world higher taxes are completely unacceptable.

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