Taxpayers vs Bureaucrats, Part XXXVIII

You know that bureaucrats are getting wildly overcompensated if even the New York Times is publishing articles about the problem. The article notes that there is a nationwide problem, and then cites developments in Colorado, where lawmakers actually took a tiny step in the right direction by limiting cost-of-living adjustments for existing retirees. Not surprisingly, the bureaucrats are suing to overturn this reform.

There’s a class war coming to the world of government pensions. The haves are retirees who were once state or municipal workers. Their seemingly guaranteed and ever-escalating monthly pension benefits are breaking budgets nationwide. The have-nots are taxpayers who don’t have generous pensions. Their 401(k)s or individual retirement accounts have taken a real beating in recent years and are not guaranteed. And soon, many of those people will be paying higher taxes or getting fewer state services as their states put more money aside to cover those pension checks. …Consider what’s going on in Colorado – and what is likely to unfold in other states and municipalities around the country. Earlier this year, in an act of rare political courage, a bipartisan coalition of state legislators passed a pension overhaul bill. Among other things, the bill reduced the raise that people who are already retired get in their pension checks each year. …this was apparently the first time that state legislators had forced current retirees to share the pain. Sharing the burden seems to be the obvious solution so we don’t continue to kick the problem into the future. “We have to take this on, if there is any way of bringing fiscal sanity to our children,” said former Gov. Richard Lamm of Colorado, a Democrat. “The New Deal is demographically obsolete. You can’t fund the dream of the 1960s on the economy of 2010.” But in Colorado, some retirees and those eligible to retire still want to live that dream. So they sued the state to keep all of the annual cost-of-living increases they thought they would be getting in perpetuity. …”All I can say is that I am sorry,” said Brandon Shaffer, a Democrat, the president of the Colorado State Senate, who helped lead the bipartisan coalition that pushed through the changes. (He also had to break the news to his mom, a retired teacher.) “I am tremendously sympathetic. But as a steward of the public trust, this is what we had to do to preserve the retirement fund.” Taxpayers, whose payments are also helping to restock Colorado’s pension fund, may not be as sympathetic, though. The average retiree in the fund stopped working at the sprightly age of 58 and deposits a check for $2,883 each month. Many of them also got a 3.5 percent annual raise, no matter what inflation was, until the rules changed this year.

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Great Moments in Local Government

Julie Murphy is obviously a dangerous criminal. What else would you call a 7-year-old girl who does something as dangerous and illegal as operating a lemonade stand without getting a $120 temporary restaurant license? Fortunately, the health and safety of the people of Multnomah County were protected when an alert bureaucrat shut down her lemonade trafficking operation.

It’s hardly unusual to hear small-business owners gripe about licensing requirements or complain that heavy-handed regulations are driving them into the red. So when Multnomah County shut down an enterprise last week for operating without a license, you might just sigh and say, there they go again. Except this entrepreneur was a 7-year-old named Julie Murphy. Her business was a lemonade stand at the Last Thursday monthly art fair in Northeast Portland. The government regulation she violated? Failing to get a $120 temporary restaurant license. Turns out that kids’ lemonade stands — those constants of summertime — are supposed to get a permit in Oregon… “I understand the reason behind what they’re doing and it’s a neighborhood event, and they’re trying to generate revenue,” said Jon Kawaguchi, environmental health supervisor for the Multnomah County Health Department. “But we still need to put the public’s health first.” …After 20 minutes, a “lady with a clipboard” came over and asked for their license. When Fife explained they didn’t have one, the woman told them they would need to leave or possibly face a $500 fine. Surprised, Fife started to pack up. The people staffing the booths next to them encouraged the two to stay, telling them the inspectors had no right to kick them out of the neighborhood gathering. They also suggested that they give away the lemonade and accept donations instead and one of them made an announcement to the crowd to support the lemonade stand. That’s when business really picked up — and two inspectors came back, Fife said. Julie started crying, while her mother packed up and others confronted the inspectors. “It was a very big scene,” Fife said.

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Taxpayers vs Bureaucrats, Part XXXVII

If you have municipal bonds issued by the city of Los Angeles, you may want to dump them while there’s still time. The LA Times reports that one-third of the city’s budget in 2015 will get consumed by pensions and benefits for retired bureaucrats. 

The cost of retirement benefits for Los Angeles city employees will grow by $800 million over the next five years, dramatically eroding the amount of money available for public services to taxpayers, according to a report issued Tuesday. In a bleak assessment delivered to members of the City Council, City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana said pensions and health benefits for current and future retirees would jump from $1.4 billion next year to at least $2.2 billion in 2015. …By 2015, nearly 20% of the city’s general fund budget is expected to go toward the retirement costs of police officers and firefighters, who now have an average retirement age of 51. The figure was 8% last year. Once civilian employees are factored in, nearly a third of the city’s general fund could be consumed by retirement costs by 2015, Santana said.

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Time to Shut Down the TSA?

In his Chicago Tribune column, Steve Champman suggests that the TSA’s bureaucratic inefficiency does more harm than good, especially if we place any value of liberty.

Get rid of the no-fly list entirely. For that matter, get rid of the requirement that passengers provide government-approved identification just to go from one place to another. Americans have a constitutionally protected right, recognized by the Supreme Court, to travel freely. They also have the right not to be subject to unreasonable searches and other government intrusions. But in the blind pursuit of safety, we have swallowed restrictions on travel and infringements on privacy we would never tolerate elsewhere. The no-fly list is a punishment in search of a crime. As Richard Sobel, a director of the Cyber Privacy Project and a scholar at Northwestern University, points out, it inflicts a penalty without a trial or any other form of due process. The TSA doesn’t say what it takes to get on the list, and it doesn’t make it crystal clear how to get off. If it acts in an arbitrary or malicious way, the victim has little recourse except appealing to the agency’s better angels. But the whole idea behind the list doesn’t make much sense. Supposedly, we have hundreds or even thousands of U.S. residents who are too dangerous to be allowed on a plane — but safe enough to be trusted in all sorts of other places (subway trains, sports venues, shopping malls, skyscrapers) where someone carrying a bomb or a gun could wreak havoc. If those on the list are truly dangerous, the government should arrest and prosecute them, with their guilt decided by courts. If they are not dangerous enough to arrest, they should have the same freedom to travel as everyone else. We don’t prohibit all ex-convicts from flying. How can we justify barring people convicted of nothing? …Not so many years ago, Sobel notes, you could show up without a reservation or a ticket at Washington’s National Airport (now Reagan National Airport), walk onto the hourly shuttle to LaGuardia, take a seat and pay your fare in cash. No one knew who you were, and no one cared.

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Taxpayers vs. Bureaucrats, Part XXXVI

Even I am shocked about how politicians and bureaucrats are bilking the poor people of Bell, California. I wish I had this example reported by Bloomberg for my video on overpaid bureaucrats, but mostly I hope that taxpayers rise up in revolt against the way the insiders are scamming the system and ripping off society’s productive outsiders. 

Hundreds of residents of one of the poorest municipalities in Los Angeles County shouted in protest last night as tensions rose over a report that the city’s manager earns an annual salary of almost $800,000. An overflow crowd packed a City Council meeting in Bell, a mostly Hispanic city of 38,000 about 10 miles (16 kilometers) southeast of Los Angeles, to call for the resignation of Mayor Oscar Hernandez and other city officials. Residents left standing outside the chamber banged on the doors and shouted “fuera,” or “get out” in Spanish. It was the first council meeting since the Los Angeles Times reported July 15 that Chief Administrative Officer Robert Rizzo earns $787,637 — with annual 12 percent raises — and that Bell pays its police chief $457,000, more than Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck makes in a city of 3.8 million people. Bell council members earn almost $100,000 for part-time work.

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Federally-Funded Job-Training Programs Don’t Work

Kudos to the New York Times for actually looking at the evidence and publishing a story exposing the costly failure of job-training programs financed by the federal government. I also couldn’t help but note that the Obama Administration is claiming that the programs are a success. Not because lots of people are getting jobs, but because many more people are signed up for the program. That kind of upside-down thinking is typical of Washington, where success is defined by the number of people lured into government dependency.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans have enrolled in federally financed training programs in recent years, only to remain out of work. That has intensified skepticism about training as a cure for unemployment. Even before the recession created the bleakest job market in more than a quarter-century, job training was already producing disappointing results. A study conducted for the Labor Department tracking the experience of 160,000 laid-off workers in 12 states from mid-2003 to mid-2005 — a time of economic expansion — found that those who went through training wound up earning little more than those who did not, even three and four years later. “Over all, it appears possible that ultimate gains from participation are small or nonexistent,” the study concluded. …Labor economists and work force development experts say the frustration that frequently results from job training reflects the dubious quality of many programs. Most last only a few months, providing general skills without conferring useful credentials in specialized fields. Programs rarely involve potential employers and are typically too modest to enable cast-off workers to begin new careers. Most job training is financed through the federal Workforce Investment Act, which was written in 1998 — a time when hiring was extraordinarily robust. …The Obama administration argues that expanded job training has already delivered success. …Last year, the number of laid-off workers in job training reached 241,000, up from about 124,000 the year before, according to the Labor Department. …Experts harbor doubts about the reliability of Labor Department numbers, which are derived from reports by state agencies that collect data from community colleges and employment offices whose training funds are dependent upon reaching benchmarks. Twice the Labor Department had to correct the data it supplied for this article.

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Washington vs. America

The fact that government is growing is not big news. The fact that bureaucrats are overpaid is hardly a big revelation. But it is interesting that a DC-based newspaper like Politico has a story about how Washington is prospering while the rest of the country is suffering. Too bad they didn’t connect the dots and explain that the rest of the country is hurting BECAUSE Washington is thriving.

America is struggling with a sputtering economy and high unemployment — but times are booming for Washington’s governing class. The massive expansion of government under President Barack Obama has basically guaranteed a robust job market for policy professionals, regulators and contractors for years to come. The housing market, boosted by the large number of high-income earners in the area, many working in politics and government, is easily outpacing the markets in most of the country. And there are few signs of economic distress in hotels, restaurants or stores in the D.C. metro area. As a result, there is a yawning gap between the American people and D.C.’s powerful when it comes to their economic reality — and their economic perceptions. A new POLITICO poll, conducted by market research and consulting firm Penn Schoen Berland, underscores the big divide: Roughly 45 percent of “Washington elites” said the country and the economy are headed in the right direction, while roughly 25 percent of the general population said they felt that way.

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Taxpayers vs. Bureaucrats, Part XXXV

Oakland politicans have created a fiscal crisis by spending too much money. This has caused strife with the police union according to a San Francisco paper. The details of the fight are not very remarkable, but I was stunned to read that the average compensation for a cop is $188,000 per year. I have plenty of sympathy for cops (at least the ones who protect life, liberty and property rather than the uniformed bureaucrats who monitor speed traps and harass pot smokers and hookers), but I am 99 percent confident that taxpayers could attract just as many competent officers at a much lower cost.

The council voted last month to lay off more than 10 percent of the police force to cope with what officials describe as an unprecedented financial crisis. The $407 million general fund budget for the fiscal year that began July 1 represents a decline of $69 million since 2005, and public safety now accounts for three-fourths of discretionary spending. With the average officer’s salary and benefits totaling $188,000 a year, City Councilman Ignacio De La Fuente, a union leader himself, has described the situation as “unsustainable.”

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Political Humor and Government Bureaucracy

Once upon a time the government had a vast scrap yard in the middle of a desert.

 

Congress said, “Someone may steal from it at night.”  So they created a night watchman position and hired a person for the job.  

 

Then Congress said, “How does the watchman do his job without instruction?”

 

So they created a planning department and hired two people, one person to write the instructions, and one person to do time studies.  

 

Then Congress said, “How will we know the night watchman is doing the tasks correctly?” So they created a Quality Control department and hired two people, one to do the studies and one to write the reports.  

 

Then Congress said, “How are these people going to get paid?” So They created the following positions, a time keeper, and a payroll officer, then hired two people.  

 

Then Congress said, “Who will be accountable for all of these people?” So they created an administrative section and hired three people, an Administrative Officer, Assistant Administrative Officer, and a Legal Secretary.  

 

Then Congress said, “We have had this command in operation for one Year and we are $18,000 over budget, we must cutback overall cost.”  So they laid off the night watchman. 

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Good Polling Data

I certainly don’t think public policy should be based on polling data, but I always am happy when the American people are on the right side of an issue since it increases the possibility of good outcomes in Washington. Here are some very encouraging results from a Rasmussen poll on taxes.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Adults shows that only 19% would be willing to pay higher taxes to avoid layoffs of state employees. Sixty-nine percent (69%) say they would not be willing to pay more in taxes for this reason. Another 11% are undecided. Adults feel similarly when it comes to funding entitlement programs. Twenty-two percent (22%) would pay higher taxes to prevent cuts in entitlement programs for low-income Americans. Sixty-three percent (63%) say they would not pay more to keep these programs afloat. Another 15% are undecided.

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Taxpayers vs. Bureaucrats, Part XXXIV

This new video from Reason.tv is a sobering look at how excessive pensions for state and local government bureaucrats are creating a fiscal nightmare for governments across the nation.

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Great Moments in International Bureaucracy

Europe’s economy is stagnant, the euro currency is in danger of collapse, and many nations are on the verge of bankruptcy. But one thing you can count on in this time of crisis is for prompt, thoughtful, and intelligent action by the super-bureaucrats of the European Commission. Right? Well, maybe not. You can be confident, however, that they will generate idiotic regulations that increase costs and trample national sovereignty. The latest example is some new red tape that will prohibit grocers from selling items based on numerical quantity. I’m not joking. Here’s a blurb from the UK-based Telegraph:

Under the draft legislation, to come into force as early as next year, the sale of groceries using the simple measurement of numbers will be replaced by an EU-wide system based on weight. It would mean an end to packaging descriptions such as eggs by the dozen, four-packs of apples, six bread rolls or boxes of 12 fish fingers. …The changes would cost the food and retail industries millions of pounds as items would have to be individually weighed to ensure the accuracy of the label. Trade magazine, The Grocer, said food industry sources had described the move as “bonkers” and “absolute madness”. Its editor, Adam Leyland, said the EU had “created a multi-headed monster”. Caroline Spelman said: “This goes against common sense. Shopkeeping is a long standing British tradition and we know what customers want. They want to buy eggs by the dozen and they should be allowed to – a point I shall be making clear to our partners in Europe.” …Andrew Opie, food director of the British Retail Consortium, which represents 90 per cent of UK shops, said: “This is a bad proposal – we need to help consumers, not confuse them.”

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Taxpayers vs. Bureaucrats, Part XXXIII

If misery loves company, then American and English taxpayers can enjoy a bonding experience after reading this story about excessive pay for bureaucrats in Brussels. According to the Daily Telegraph, at least 1,000 (and probably more than 2,000) of these euro-crats earn more than the U.K. Prime Minster.

More than one thousand EU officials earn more than the Prime Minister, according to research carried out by the The Daily Telegraph. …Included in the overall total are Herman Van Rompuy, the EU president, Baroness Ashton, Europe’s foreign minister, José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission President along with six vice-presidents and 19 commissioners. This group of 28 people, who are all unelected, earn £57,000 to £103,000 more than Mr Cameron and include the three best paid politicians, Mr Van Rompuy, Mr Barroso and Lady Ashton, in the western world. Among the 995 European civil servants, who are on the AD14 to AD16 grades earning £146,267 to £179,703, are at least 90 unelected British EU officials earning more than the Prime Minister. The Commission has admitted that the true numbers cannot be calculated and could be at least twice as high. After tax relief and generous perks are taken into account it is likely that over 2,000 officials are earning more than Mr Cameron. …Research and information requests have also found that there are 19 European Parliament assistants, or researchers to MEPs, who earn £75,752 a year. Another 12 assistants, eligible along with EU officials for low tax rates, pocket £70,217 a year. A British MP in the House of Commons earns just £65,738.

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Bureaucracy Run Amok

John Derbyshire of National Review has an interesting article on bureaucratic harassment of private business. He begins with a personal story of something that happened when he first came to the United States and was working at a food-preparation company:

The first federal regulator I ever knew was a fellow named Ernie. …Ernie was a power freak. If you showed him the respect he thought he was entitled to, he was generally harmless. If you crossed him, however, his wrath was terrible. The boss of the firm was a no-nonsense former Marine. …He put up with Ernie as best he could, but sometimes the forbearance required was too great. …On one occasion the boss lost it and yelled at Ernie. Ernie then had his minions go round the firm “tagging” all the preparation tables with what looked like old-fashioned white luggage tags. Peered at up close, the tags revealed printed messages saying that no food product could go anywhere near the tagged table until the tag was removed, with ferocious federal penalties threatened against transgressors. The tags could, of course, only be removed by Ernie. The tables were out of commission. We had to scrub those suckers three or four times over with green scouring pads and Comet before Ernie would deign to remove his tags and let the firm get on with their business. Another time, after some other go-round with the boss, Ernie determined that the firm’s ZIP code was printed on the dinner boxes in too small a font. The boss had to get rolls of stick-over labels printed up, and we menials spent a couple of days working our way through the freezer rooms relabeling the dinners so the ZIP code was in the FDA-approved font size. I guess this was real important to the nation’s health.

The substance of his article is another example of bureaucratic excess, though this time with much greater potential for economic damage. The federal bureaucracy and Washington political elite (with the support of big companies that don’t like competition) are hampering the development of an industry that is offering 100-percent safe genetic testing for consumers. The excerpt is long, but shows how government intervention is both unwarranted and driven by bad motives.

A firm named Pathway Genomics, based in San Diego, is one of many that have come up in the past few years offering to scan a person’s DNA and report on any significant disease-risk or drug-response markers. You swab your cheek with a sterile Q-Tip they provide, or spit into a sterile plastic tube, and you send the saliva sample off to them. They scan it and send you back the information. The cost of a test can be from $20 to $500, depending on how many markers are scanned for. Earlier this year Pathway entered into a deal with Walgrens, a nationwide drugstore chain with 7,500 outlets. The deal would have allowed Pathway to operate counters at 6,000 of those outlets, selling their service. Instead of signing up with Pathway via their website and sending in your saliva sample through the mail, you could do the thing right there in your local drugstore. Health reporter Rob Stein at the Washington Post did a story on the Pathway-Walgreens deal. The story appeared in the May 11 edition of the newspaper. By way of researching it, Stein called the FDA to ask them for a quote. …The call, however, woke the FDA from their dogmatic slumbers. …The regulocrats lumbered into action. A letter went out to Pathway warning them that their test was a “medical device” likely subject to FDA oversight and pre-marketing approval. Hearing of this, Walgreens canceled the deal with Pathway. Close behind the FDA, like jackals following tigers, came Congress. Henry Waxman, head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, demanded a comprehensive document dump from three of the firms — every letter, every lab report, every e-mail. Last week the FDA escalated the war, sending letters out to five more of the firms (23andMe, Navigenics, DeCode, Illumina, and Knome) couched in similar terms to the original Pathway letter. …The logic of classifying these DNA scans as “medical devices” bears a closer look. What actually is a “medical device”? Answer: A medical device is anything the FDA declares to be a medical device. …You might still think it’s a bit of a stretch to call these tests “medical devices.” They are, after all, merely informational. Consumers are not being dosed with anything, or having anything attached to or implanted in their bodies, nor even inserted into their mouths for purposes of tongue depression. “Medical device”? Huh? …Lest you should think this is a straightforward tale of power-crazed regulators and tax-hungry politicians killing off an infant industry, please let it be noted that Big Government is by no means the only predator that struggling start-ups must face. There is also Big Business. In seeking to widen its regulatory scope, the FDA has some support from big, established biotech companies. Back in 2008, biotech giant Genentech petitioned the FDA to expand its authority into products involving “laboratory-developed tests” (LDTs). An LDT is one with an expert in the loop. An example of a non-LDT would be a home pregnancy test — no expert between test and interpretation. LDTs are more lightly regulated than non-LDTs, for understandable reasons. …It was natural for Genentech and other established companies to look with disfavor on impertinent startups taking advantage of regulatory loopholes. Big Business is just as capable of hating entrepreneurial startups as is Big Government. A business can only lobby, though. Government can act. ….The U.S.A. is a real nice place to have a job in government, and still a pretty nice place to work for a big corporation — especially one designated “too big to fail.” For the start-up entrepreneur in an ideologically fraught field, however, the environment is increasingly hostile. Why do they even bother?

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Tea Parties, Defense Spending, Overpaid Bureaucrats, Green Energy, and International Taxation

These are the issues I discuss in this wide-ranging Fox Business News interview.

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Taxpayers vs. Bureaucrats, Part XXXII

American taxpayers are not the only ones getting ripped off by lavish pay and perks for bureaucrats. The Daily Mail reports on a new study about public sector pay in the United Kingdom:

Public sector employees work nine years less than their private sector counterparts but are paid 30 per cent more, a bombshell report reveals today. Extraordinary research tells a tale of two Britains – a state sector awash with taxpayers’ cash while the rest of the economy struggles to stay afloat. Public sector workers enjoy better pay than those in the private sector, as well as better pensions, shorter hours, and earlier retirement. Over their lifetimes, those in the private sector work 23 per cent longer – equivalent to an extra nine years and ten weeks – than public sector employees. This is thanks to a combination of shorter hours, more time off and earlier retirement. The findings explode once and for all the old idea that public sector workers have better job security and gold-plated pensions because they have lower salaries. …The report, by centre-Right think tank Policy Exchange, also found that the chance of being made compulsorily redundant in the civil service is an astonishing 0.00007 per cent. Generous pension schemes in the state sector are now worth up to 15 per cent on top of salary, the report says, while public sector pay costs have soared by more than a third in real terms over the last seven years – three times faster than in the private sector. …etween 1997 and 2007 public sector productivity fell, while productivity in the private sector increased by nearly 28 per cent – leaving the former only two-thirds as productive as the latter. Between 2002 and 2009, the number working in the public sector increased nearly five times more quickly than numbers in the private sector.

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Taxpayers vs. Bureaucrats, Part XXXI

The competition to be the Greece of America has a lot of contestants. California and Illinois certainly are strong candidates. New Jersey was an early favorite, though Gov. Christie is actually doing some good things and pulling the state back from the precipice. But let’s not forget New York. Here’s an excerpt from a Wall Street Journal column about how bureaucrats are gaming this system to get absurd salaries:

Will there be a run on New York’s debt, much like we saw in Greece this spring, causing interest rates to soar in Athens? With a $135 billion budget, New York State faces a shortfall of around $9 billion, which might be manageable if politicians had the courage to go “where the money is,” says E.J. McMahon, a state budget expert at the Manhattan Institute. “The big problem,” he adds, “is that no one will take on the unions and especially their gigantic pensions.” A new Manhattan Institute report shows that it’s been business-as-usual in the state’s dealings with Big Labor, despite the fiscal crisis. Last year, 74,000 workers at the Metropolitan Transit Authority got a 2.4% raise even as their agency was teetering on bankruptcy. Some 8,000 MTA employees now earn $100,000 or more in annual salary, and 44 earn more than $200,000 a year, putting them in the top 3% of income in America. The latest plan, Mr. McMahon says, is for Gov. Paterson and the Democrats in the legislature to “cap rising pension bills by ‘amortizing’ them, which essentially means borrowing $2.5 billion from the pension fund in the next four years alone. Of course, this won’t reduce costs — it will merely push them into the future.”

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Great Moments in Government Waste and Stupidity

Here’s a depressing story from the Columbus Dispatch that shows the government’s ability to be incompetent and wasteful at the same time. A labor dispute that never should have existed (but did, thanks to the incestuous relationship of unions and government) eventually led to nine employees getting paid for an entire week to take naps and have a coloring contest:

A group of Postal Service employees in Columbus spent five days in late May and early June being paid to do no work. A supervisor told them to stay in an area of the processing and distribution center near Port Columbus. The nine men played cards and took naps. One of them brought in coloring books, and they had a contest to see who could make the prettiest picture. They all earned their regular wages, $20.58 to $26.34 per hour. This was the latest move in a labor tangle that began with the Postal Service trying to save money. …Months of negotiations and legal filings followed. In May, a Postal Service attorney argued to a board administrative judge that the appeals were now moot. The truck drivers had been given their driving jobs back, the attorney wrote. Except that was true only on paper, say Kidwell and the eight other drivers. They weren’t driving trucks. They were playing cards and having a coloring contest. They spent a few days training to be letter carriers, a job they wanted even less than mail handler. But they never drove trucks. Letters from the Postal Service to the drivers also make it clear that they would be “drivers” for one, two-week pay period only. Then, “you will be placed into the Letter Carrier Craft,” said the letters, signed by Marvin B. Coleman, the manager of labor relations for the Columbus Postal District.

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Meet Olga Stefou, a Perfect Symbol of Greece’s Downfall

The Los Angeles Times has a story that provides an inside look at the attitudes that have contributed to Greece’s fiscal collapse. Let’s start with Olga Stefou, who is a good (or bad) symbol for her nation’s downfall. She protests in favor of bigger government, naively asserting that the budget shortfall can be solved by pulling 122 troops out of Afghanistan and taxing the Orthodox Church. Olga’s entitlement mentality is not unusual. The story also notes that young Greek women think a government job is the most desirable thing in a potential mate. At the risk of being politically incorrect, the people of Greece (at least the ones in the moocher class) deserve a miserable future.

Olga Stefou is 20. She speaks passable English and studies political science. These days she goes into the streets to shout slogans against the government and the International Monetary Fund. She has no choice, she says: She believes that upon graduation she’ll be lucky to land a job that pays $500 a month. “I’ll be forced to live with my parents and work three jobs,” she said, pausing among the throngs trickling into the street as a recent demonstration got underway. “I’ll be doomed to a fate I haven’t chosen. This is the state of my generation.” Stefou believes that the government is bound to respond to her discontent. And she has suggestions: Greece should make up its budget shortfall by pulling its 122 troops from Afghanistan and levying steep taxes on the Orthodox Church rather than squeezing the workers, she says. The government is “in some way afraid of us,” Stefou said with a shrug. “There are too many of us.” A hot spring night was creeping over Athens. Thousands of demonstrators packed the street; many of them looked to be about Stefou’s age. They marched in a slow circle down Stadiou Street to Parliament and then back again, yelling slogans: “Down with the junta of the IMF!” “Euro is here and it makes you poorer!” “Thieves, thieves, banks, stockbrokers and politicians!” …Last year, Michas did a study of Greek marriage agencies. He found that the top attribute sought by middle-class young women in a potential mate was a job in the civil service or the military. Government service has long been prized because of the elaborate set of benefits attached to the position. “This is the mind-set now,” Michas said. “It’s a culture of dependency, first on parents, and it becomes a dependency on the state.”

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Great Moments in Local Government

A number of years ago, I read about a good samaritan who got in trouble for plowing a street so his neighbors weren’t trapped by snow. The local government didn’t like being exposed for incompetence. More recently, I watched a documentary about the Air Florida crash in Washington in the early 1980s, which featured a civilian jumping in the water to rescue a woman while a bunch of bureaucrats were apparently frozen into inaction by procedural rules. Fortunately, the hero in this case didn’t get in trouble for unauthorized rescuing. The same can’t be said, unfortunately, for a rafting guide in Arkansas who was arrested for coming to the aid of a 13-year old girl. This story was linked on Instapundit, and Glenn Reynolds appropriately noted that the bureaucrats must have been pissed that they were exposed for incompetence.

Clear Creek sheriff’s deputies on Thursday arrested a rafting guide for swimming to a stranded young rafter who had tumbled from his boat on Clear Creek. Ryan Daniel Snodgrass, a 28-year-old guide with Arkansas Valley Adventures rafting company, was charged with “obstructing government operations,” said Clear Creek Sheriff Don Krueger. “He was told not to go in the water, and he jumped in and swam over to the victim and jeopardized the rescue operation,” said Krueger, noting that his office was deciding whether to file similar charges against another guide who was at the scene just downstream of Kermitts Roadhouse on U.S. 6. Duke Bradford, owner of Arkansas Valley Adventures, said Snodgrass did the right thing by contacting the 13-year-old Texas girl immediately and not waiting for the county’s search and rescue team to assemble ropes, rafts and rescuers. “When you have someone in sight who has taken a long swim, you need to make contact immediately,” said Bradford, a 15-year rafting guide and ski patroller from Summit County. “This is just silly. Ryan Snodgrass acted entirely appropriately. These guys came to the scene late and there was a rescue in progress. They came in and took over an existing rescue. To leave a patient on the side of a river while you get your gear out of the car and set up a rescue system you read about in a book is simply not good policy.”

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Taxpayers vs. Bureaucrats, Part XXX

It is probably safe to assume that government bureaucrats are overpaid in every city and state, but it won’t come as a big surprise to learn that San Francisco is especially profligate. Here are some disturbing details compiled by Investor’s Business Daily:

We have seen the future and it works — for certain people. Take San Francisco municipal workers. The San Francisco Chronicle recently detailed just how overpaid the city’s employees are. Their average yearly salary is $93,000 before benefits. A third of them made more than $100,000 in 2009. A newly retired deputy police chief (not even the city’s top cop) made $516,118. …The city’s unions, which are powerful even by California standards, have produced a public-workers’ paradise financed by high taxes on tourists, businesses (San Francisco even has a 1.5% tax on payrolls) and regular folk who choose to live there or who haven’t figured out a way to leave. The city has poor and homeless people just like any other. …in 2009, 28 city employees made more than the mayor, Gavin Newsom, who pulled down a respectable $250,903. Firefighters in San Francisco have a base salary of $102,648, while even lowly payroll clerks start at $54,314.

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Dan Mitchell Gets Results

I gave a speech in Hungary about two weeks ago and now the government has announced a big step in the direction of better fiscal policy. According to Reuters, “Hungary’s new government plans to introduce a flat personal income tax of 16 percent from 2011, as well as a 15 percent cut in public sector wages.” Those are the headline initiatives, but the fiscal reform package includes other good policies. Here’s a blurb from The Economist.

After a three-day emergency cabinet meeting over the weekend, Viktor Orban, the prime minister, announced the government’s new economic programme this afternoon. The battered forint quickly jumped almost 2% in response. …The introduction of a 16% flat personal income tax is a daring move, and could have important repercussions beyond balancing the state’s books. Unemployment, or at least that element of it which is declared, is nudging 12%, and one reason is Hungary’s cumbersome bureacracy and heavy tax burden. Now Mr Orban has announced that corporation tax for companies with annual profits of less than 500m forints will be reduced from 19% to 10%. Ten more small and bothersome taxes are set to be abolished altogether.

A few years ago, when several nations each year were adopting the flat tax, I arbitrarily decided that this rock classic would be the theme song of the tax reform movement. Any better suggestions?

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Governor Christie Is a Taxpayer Hero

I may as well confess that I have a man-crush on Governor Christie. It’s not nearly as bad as Andrew Sullivan’s fixation on Obama (and it certainly hasn’t involved me changing my views), but this video and the excerpt below are two examples of a politician actually doing the right thing and giving intelligent and coherent explanations to justify his actions. The video shows him taking on the teacher unions and the story is about his veto of a class-warfare tax bill.

Christie may wind up “growing in office” and becoming a squish, but so far he is the nation’s most impressive Republican politician. That’s normally damning with faint praise, but not in this case.

It took about two minutes from the time Senate President Steve Sweeney certified the passage of the millionaires tax package for Gov. Chris Christie to veto the bills at his desk. “While I have little doubt that the sponsors and supporters of this bill sincerely believe that the state can tax its way out of this financial crisis, I believe that this bill does nothing more than repeat the failed, irresponsible and unsustainable fiscal policies of the past,” wrote Christie in his veto statement. “Now is not the time for more of the same. Ultimately, another tax increase will punish the state’s struggling small businesses and set our economy further back from recovery.”

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Taxpayers vs. Bureaucrats, Part XXIX

This story from Philadelphia, which I saw on Reason’s Hit and Run blog, is one of the worst examples I’ve ever seen of government bureaucrats bilking taxpayers. The City Manager, who already receives an absurdly extravagant salary and hasn’t even been on the job for 2-1/2 years, was able to get a guaranteed $50,000 annual pension in exchange for a one-time cost of less than $125,000. Unless she is already in her 80s, that means she will get an astoundingly high rate of return. I’m too lazy to do any calculations (and I would need her age anyhow), but I’d be surprised if she’s not getting a 20 times higher return than the rest of us peasants are receiving on our IRA(s and 401(K)s.

Camille Cates Barnett will get nearly $50,000 annually from the city pension fund for the rest of her life after June 30, when she leaves her post as Philadelphia’s managing director after two years, five months, and 24 days. On the same day that a City Council committee moved to close the loophole that allows short-time employees such as Barnett to buy credit in the city’s pension fund based on public service elsewhere, the Board of Pensions and Retirement revealed that Barnett had done just that. Barnett has paid $122,303 to become vested in the pension plan, according to the Mayor’s Office and the Pension Board, a privilege unionized employees are entitled to only after serving five years. …Barnett could not be reached for comment Wednesday night. She previously declined to comment on her plans. Barnett’s salary this year is $181,693, making her one of city government’s highest-paid public officials. Mayor Nutter has not named her successor.

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Taxpayers vs. Bureaucrats, Part XXVIII

You might think I would be past the point of being surprised about excessive pay for bureaucrats, especially after narrating the new video for the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, but even I’m shocked by this New York Times story about bloated pay for bureaucrats at New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority. More than 8,000 of them pull in six-figure compensation packages, and 50 of them get more than $200,000. By the way, don’t snicker and think this is just a problem for NYC taxpayers. Thanks to federal subsidies, folks all across America are paying for this taxpayer ripoff.

In an era of generous municipal salaries and union-friendly overtime rules, it may not come as a complete shock that there are thousands of Metropolitan Transportation Authority employees — 8,074, to be precise — who made $100,000 or more last year. The usual top-level managers are included in that list, but so are dozens of lower-level employees, including conductors, police officers and engineers, many of whom pulled in six figures in overtime and retirement benefits alone. One of those workers, a Long Island Rail Road conductor who retired in April, made $239,148, about $4,000 more than the authority’s chief financial officer, according to payroll data released on Wednesday. …more than a quarter of the Long Island Rail Road’s 7,000 employees earned more than $100,000 last year, including the conductor, Thomas J. Redmond, and two locomotive engineers — who were among the top 25 earners in the entire transportation authority. …Two car repairmen at the L.I.R.R. and 12 police officers assigned to the authority’s bridges and tunnels, some of whom earned more than double their base salaries, were among the 50 employees at the authority who collected $200,000 or more, the data show. …Around 60 percent of the authority’s current budget — about $7 billion — is used to pay labor costs including payroll, pensions, and overtime.

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Taxpayers vs. Bureaucrats, the Video Version

Regular readers of this blog know about our “Taxpayers vs. Bureaucrats” series. Well, now we have the video version.

There are three things in the video that deserve special emphasis. First, bureaucrats are vastly overpaid. The government data cited in the video show that total compensation for the federal civil service is twice as high, on average, as it is for workers in the productive sector of the economy. There are some bureaucrats who deserve above-average pay, such as scientists dealing with nuclear weapons, but it is outrageous that the average drone in the federal bureaucracy is getting twice as much compensation as the taxpayers (serfs) who pay their salaries.

Second, this mini-documentary debunks the silly argument (put forth by government employee unions, of course) that bureaucrats are underpaid compared to the private sector. The Department of Labor has data looking at voluntary departure rates by profession. If government workers were being underpaid, you would expect them to be more likely to leave their jobs in order to take new positions in the (supposedly higher paid) private sector. Instead, the video reveals that people in the private sector are six times more likely to switch jobs than federal bureaucrats.

Third, the video concludes with the essential point that most federal bureaucrats should be paid nothing because they work for departments and agencies that should not exist.

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Taxpayers vs. Bureaucrats, Part XXVII

Another local government in California is contemplating bankruptcy. That’s hardly big news, though, since many California jurisdictions have been bled dry by greedy public sector unions and the city of Vallejo already has thrown in the towel. What is amazing, though, is that the government unions are trying to get the state to pass a bill barring bankruptcy. This is eerily akin to the part of Atlas Shrugged where government officials torture John Galt in hopes of trying to force him to produce. The political thugs in Atlas Shrugged were desperate because people no longer were producing anything they could steal. The pathetic politicians and government workers – both in Ayn Rand’s book and in California – obviously don’t understand that parasites should not be so greedy that they kill the host animal. Here’s a Reuters excerpt:

Antioch’s leaders earlier this month said bankruptcy could be an option for the cash-strapped city of roughly 100,000 on the eastern fringe of the San Francisco Bay area. …But cost-cutting measures may not be enough to keep Antioch’s books balanced, so its city council is openly discussing bankruptcy. …Orange County Treasurer Chriss Street would not be surprised if more local governments across the Golden State sound a similar alarm. …Despite its stigma, bankruptcy has paid an important dividend for Vallejo: It has forced public employee unions to the negotiating table, providing city leaders an opportunity to rein in compensation, which city officials said accounts for more than three-quarters of Vallejo’s general fund spending. City Councilwoman Stephanie Gomes said the effort has led to concessions from three of four city unions. Like Vallejo, Los Angeles is suffering from weak revenue at the same time the cost of its pensions and other retirement benefits are rising. Former Mayor Richard Riordan said those factors put the government of the second largest U.S. city on track to declare bankruptcy between now and 2014. …Talk of municipal bankruptcy has not escaped California’s politically powerful public employee unions. A number of them are pressing the legislature to pass a bill that would require local governments to get the approval of a state board before filing for bankruptcy. Since the board could be stacked with union-friendly appointees, bankruptcy pleas could be rejected or delayed. “It’s a horrible bill,” Levinson said. “If you don’t have the bankruptcy outlet, what do you do? If you can’t pay your bills what do you do?”

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Taxpayers vs. Bureaucrats, Part XXVI

Two cheers for House Republicans, who plan on offering an amendment to freeze the pay of federal bureaucrats. There are two reasons, though, why they don’t deserve three cheers. First, they should be proposing significant pay cuts, as nations such as Spain and Ireland have implemented. Second, they didn’t do anything to rein in excessive pay for government workers when they were in power, so Stenny Hoyer actually is right when he accuses them of playing politics. That being said, I don’t complain when politicians do the right thing for the wrong reason. Here’s a blurb from the Politico story:

House Republicans will try to force a vote on freezing federal wages when Democrats bring a defense spending bill to the floor Friday afternoon. …Even though the proposal would be attached to the defense bill, military salaries would be exempt from the pay freeze. The proposal would also freeze pay for members of Congress. …Republicans say that freezing federal salaries — except for those in the military — would save the government $30 billion in the next decade. The Obama administration intends to increase federal salaries 1.4 percent. …“We need to reject this cynical ploy to make federal employees a scapegoat for spending after congressional Republicans added trillions to the debt when they were in the majority,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) wrote in an e-mailed statement.

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Taxpayers vs. Bureaucrats, Part XXV

TARP was awful and the GM-Chrysler bailout was terrible, but those wretched pieces of legislation would be surpassed by something even more reprehensible if politicians sign on to this terrible idea to bail out the bloated pension plans of state and local government bureaucrats. If this happens, I hope taxpayers respond with massive civil disobedience when it comes to paying taxes. Here is an excerpt from the Financial Times:

Illinois used to have a plan to pay off the gaping shortfall in the pension funds that pay retired teachers, university employees, state workers, judges and politicians, Dan Long recalls. Mr Long, director of the Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability, the non-partisan auditing arm of the Illinois state legislature, remembers that, back in 1994, the state laid out a proposal that would have paid off most of what was then a $17bn gap by 2011. …Illinois is the poster child of unfunded pensions in the US. But state retirement systems could become a national concern, new research shows. Joshua Rauh, associate professor of finance at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University said that, without reform, some state pensions might run out within the decade. …if these funds exhaust their assets, the size of payments for the benefits they have promised will be too large to cover through taxes, putting pressure on the federal government for a bail-out that could potentially cost more than $1,000bn, he says. “It is more than a local problem,” Mr Rauh said. “The federal government could be on the hook.” Estimates put the unfunded liabilities at between $1,000bn and $3,000bn after years of states promising benefits but not contributing enough in both good times and bad to cover them. …States have begun reforms, with some lowering return expectations and raising employee contributions and retirement ages. Mr Rauh said such measures were cosmetic and states needed comprehensive, federally sponsored reform that would require closing the systems to new members, shifting state workers to Social Security and individual plans similar to those that are used by the private sector in order to obtain incentives to borrow to bridge the gaps.

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Terminating Welfare in California?

It’s probably just a insincere negotiating ploy, but Governor Schwarzenegger has proposed to eliminate a major welfare program in California. This article from the Sacramento Bee notes that the Governator also wants to cut bureaucrat pay and impose other reforms. Given Schwarzenegger’s failure to consistently fight against special interests in previous years, and given the overwhelmingly statist orientation of the California state legislature, I am not overly optimistic that any of these reforms will occur, but it’s nice to at least have real reforms being discussed:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger asked lawmakers Friday to eliminate the state’s welfare program starting in October and dramatically scale back in-home care for the elderly and disabled as part of his May budget revision to close a $19.1 billion deficit.The Republican governor also proposed cuts to state worker compensation. Besides asking for a 5 percent pay cut, 5 percent payroll cap and 5 percent increased pension contribution, Schwarzenegger has proposed cutting one day per month of pay in exchange for leave credit….Employees would not be able to cash out any of this unused leave credit when they leave state service. …Schwarzenegger also proposed eliminating state-subsidized child care for all but preschoolers as a way to reduce the state’s education funding guarantee. …He did not respond directly when asked if his proposal to eliminate welfare was merely a negotiating position with the Democrat-dominated Legislature.Schwarzenegger also said he would not sign a budget plan unless lawmakers agree to overhaul the budget process, including creation of a “rainy-day fund” and downsizing public employee pensions for new hires.The governor did not propose any new tax hikes.

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