The real money is not so much in the gub’mint employees salaries. Folks “in the know” do consulting for cities.
Here in our town of around 125k people, our consultant and adviser to our city for water is called in quarterly, he works about 3 days to do a report, and makes around 75k a report.
The data for the report has already been compiled by the city, all he does is interpret it, which he actually farms out.
He is also one of the biggest political contributors to our mayor and our city council.
We have had studies for as much as $240k to study “stop light patterns” at a single busy intersection, oh, and my favorite, is when our city sues itself. We do that several times a year, whereby the city sues itself, hires an outside law firm to represent itself and the plaintiff (which is itself again, under some inane name like “Citizens for a Better Tomorrow”), and then the lawsuit goes on for years, with continuance after continuance. Both law firms milk it for years.
Our three big law firms are also big state law firms and dem contributors. Those suits add up to millions and millions. But, you know... its for the people.
Environmental impact studies also suck up our towns tax dollars, heck, we spent about $300k to study the impact of using a canoeist that the city hired, to drive off the geese at our city golf course, because they were annoying the golfers and making a mess. The city wanted to see if it was OK to drive them off, and what the impact would be on the neighborhood.
Yeah, life is good if your a consultant and politically connected. And yes, this goes both ways, dem and republican, don’t kid yourself.
Do you have any idea what 25 million government employees at all levels, (not including the military) and their lottery style retirement pensions are costing the American tax payers?
Consulting?....lol