Public spending—the cost of government—is sending California down the toilet. Can we expect the same elsewhere in America?Meg Whitman is running for governor of California (you’ll have to ask her “Why?!”). To make her point that California wastes taxpayer money on a massive scale, she writes about welfare:
In 1996, California had 21% of the nation’s welfare cases. Today, 32% of all welfare cases in the United States are in California, even though we only represent 12% of the total U.S. population. . . California is nearly twice as big as New York state, but we have five times as many welfare cases.
California lags much of the nation when it comes to moving people from welfare to work. . . Only 22% of welfare recipients in California who are required to meet federal work minimums are working. . .[California] is one of only nine [states failing to enforce fully] the federal government’s five-year lifetime limit on cash welfare assistance. . . Michigan, which enacted sweeping welfare reform in the 90’s,. . .has half the [share] of welfare dependency as California, despite a higher unemployment rate.
These flaws [plus] a monthly cash check that is almost 70% higher than the national average [keep California from] helping more welfare recipients leave welfare for . . . independence and dignity.
Steven Greenhut provides additional information on how California’s public sector is ruining his state. According to Greenhut, 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% at 50” retirement plan in 1999. Under this plan, at age 50 many categories of public employees are eligible for 3% 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, retirement at 50 comes with 90% of the officer’s final salary until death; then the spouse receives that money for the rest of the spouse’s life.
Even during this economic crisis, “3% at 50” has only become more entrenched. California’s unfunded pension and health care liabilities for state workers top $100 billion, and the annual pension contribution has shot up from $320 million to $7.3 billion in less than a decade.
That money will come from taxpayers. The average private-sector worker, who enjoys a lower salary and far lower retirement benefits than California government workers, will have to work longer, retire later, and pay more so that her public-employee neighbors can enjoy the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed.
California taxpayers will also have to deal with worsening public services, since there will be less money to pay for things that might actually benefit the public. Last July, Orange County Sheriff Sandra Hutchens proposed budget cuts over $20 million to make up for falling tax revenue. She slashed 40% of her department’s command staff, cut 30 positions, and made changes that affected about 200 positions through reassignments, demotions, new overtime rules, and other maneuvers. “These are services that we believe are quite important to maintaining public safety, that we’re just not going to be able to continue,” said department spokesman John MacDonald.
But Sheriff Hutchens failed to identify the tight budget’s main cause: In 2001 the Orange County Board of Supervisors had passed a retroactive pension increase for sheriff’s deputies, nearly doubling pension costs from 2000 to 2009’s pension contribution of $95 million—20% of the sheriff’s budget.
So when Hutchens decries an economic downturn costing her department $20 million, she’s silent about a pension increase costing her department more than twice that amount. Had the pension increase not passed, her department could have kept officers on the streets and avoided cuts Hutchens claims threaten public safety.
Union political power is the principal reason California is going bankrupt. Public-sector unions didn’t become legal in California until 1968. Yet now California is spearheading the re-unionization of the country. In a 2003 study of union membership rates, sociologists Ruth Milkman and Daisy Rooks wrote, “California stands out as an exception to the general pattern of the past decade. Against all odds, union density has inched upward in the nation’s most populous state, from 16.1% of all wage and salary workers in 1998 to 17.8% in 2002.”
Milkman and Rooks found that union growth in California’s public sector has far outpaced such growth in other states, for an obvious reason: “Organized labor has more political influence in California than in most other states.” More recent studies found that for the first time in five decades, U.S. unionization rates actually increased in 2008. The reason: increases in California, mainly in the government sector.
3 comments:
Very obviously, government is the problem -- particularly supporting a privileged (entitled) class that doesn't make any contribution to society but "demanding more" from everybody else -- to support them in the lifestyle they've grown accustomed to and fond of.
I guess if we want to call it that, it is a socialist society, where they take from the producers to give to the nonproducers -- as some kind of perverted sense of justice.
But that clashes with the emerging world of greater reliance and self-sufficiency now made possible by the new information and communications technologies that allow people to do their own thinking and discover the truth of any matter for themselves, and not just what benefits the job security of government employees.
Obviously, that model can't continue, with more government experts doing the thinking for everybody else (for their own benefit) but everyone is better off making those decisions for themselves, which is the greater actualization of a free society.
Those discussions seem to have been lost in the abrogation of those rights and powers to the self-appointed and anointed few of the old world establishment defending that status quo -- with themselves permanently and indelibly entrenched at the top.
What country is that?
Dick Baker wanted to leave this comment:
Another specific example of unionization bankrupting California, according to some media reporting, is the corrections system. California's unionized correctional officers have increased exponentially in numbers over recent years, and their salaries have increased dramatically also. It doesn't help that, with its "three strikes" law, California's rate (or at least number) of prisoners leads the nation. But the correctional officers oppose any reforms in the legal provisions that would reduce the number of prisoners and therefore possibly reduce their own numbers. And then there are the contractors who have been profiting mightily from the construction of new prisons.
All in all, this sounds to me to resemble Alice in Wonderland far more than the popular image of "California Dreaming".
There is clearly a lesson here, if only others (a) are willing to acknowledge it and (b) have the courage to do what is necessary to fix it.
The first step is that we need to have alternative sources of information instead of just the professional self-interests providing us with the information they want us to know through a compliant media (that may or may not know better) -- which is that they deserve ever higher wages and benefits, as the only game in town.
Those games persist as long as people believe they are the ONLY game in town -- which is what old media prided themselves on owning.
Only in the last several years has it been possible to see something else -- because that information and communications are not edited by the mainstream media trying the status quo of themselves at the top and in control. That's also true of all the institutions -- to perpetuate themselves beyond their original purposes.
The great parallel of this in history was the Chinese civil service system -- which was purged by the Chinese Cultural Revolution into the colossus of these times. It's hard not to see China as the engine of the future -- because they are just starting, but have the this cultural heritage of a leading civilization to draw on.
In the US, I think there is a shift from the old centers of culture and society that is fading to the dynamic global civilization in which the old centers no longer matter -- and their institutions of the media, government, and schools/universities that perpetuate this status quo -- of increasing entitlement for a government class.
The precedent again is China, where they sent those "scholars" to the countryside for pig-farming to reacquaint them with the realities required for a productive society.
The fortunate thing is that the most creative and innovative people are likely to be outside of that system rather than in it. Therein lies the hope of redemption, salvation and resurrection.
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