Welfare and freebies are going to have to go.
May or may not have been me, but I’ll recap.
There are 268,000 State workers.
Assume average annual salary of $100,000 (which is preposterous)
Assume annual benefits are another $100,000 (FAR more preposterous)
270,000 x $200,000 = $54 Billion.
So if you fired every single State worker, you would still have an annual budget of $86 Billion, ($140 billion - $54 billion) only add back in the salaries of all of the private sector consultants to do the work, PLUS their bonuses, which government workers don’t get. And this is assuming the preposterous, that every government Janitor and librarian and secretary bulls down $200,000 in salary and benefits. Wildly preposterous. The total is probably closer to $30 Billion for all California State employees.
Then again, you could privatize the works. Just don’t blame me if someone like Madoff comes along and embezzles a few billion from time to time.
trust funds could end up being managed by a character like Bernie Madoff, who embezzles the money while cooking the books.
I thought I would post some of the cushy government salaries and see how they stack up against that $200,000 average salary & benefits.
I’ll use Caltrans as an example since we are top-heavy in expensive engineering, and sticking with what I know.
We have about 20,000 people, about 10,000 of whom are field maintenance people. They fix guardrail and sand barrels after drunks and racers wreck them, they sweep the streets, pick up dead possums and semi-tire fragments, etc.
Here are the MOST these classes pay after years here, not the average people are getting at this time. Starting pay is much lower in every class, as it should be. Just trying to put some perspective to the absurd $200,000 average salary & benefits I used in my calc.
$35,000 - Cook (Private cooks make up to $33,000, average is $23,000)
$47,000 - Heavy Equipment Operator (Union scale is $62,000)
$42,000 - Accountant (Private accountants make up to $62,000, average is $46,000)
$43,000 - Maintenance worker (Union scale for laborers is 50,000)
$49,000 - Computer Programmer (Private programmers make up to $100,000, average is $75,000)
$49,000 - Drafter (Same for private drafters)
$50,400 - Electrician (Private Electricians make up to $55,000)
$54,000 - Heavy Equipment Mechanic (Private HE Mechanics pay up to $60,000, most are under $51,000)
$55,000 - Structural Steel Painter (Union scale is $62,000)
$56,040 - Right of Way Agent
$74,000 - Computer systems analyst (Private analysts make
$94,000 - Deputy Attorney (Private attorneys top around $120,00, most make $95,000)
$91,000 - Civil Engineer (Private engineers top out at $150,000, most make under $120,000)
$91,000 - Land Surveyor (Private surveyors top out at $66,000, most make under $45,000)
You can see that if you had to replace state workers with private workers, you wouldn’t be saving much money, except for those of you who think we stand around talking all day and those golden private workers NEVER do. Hello, GM. Hello, AIG. Hello, BofA. Hello, watercooler.
All private wages are NATIONAL AVERAGES and you can be damn sure that wages paid to private workers here in costly California are generally higher than those listed above. Sometimes MUCH higher.
All Caltrans wages from here:
http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/jobs/salaries.htm
Private sector job classifications researched here:
California Union Prevailing Wage rates here:
http://www.co.el-dorado.ca.us/bos/wwwroot/attachments/47c8a3c9-1bf9-4368-b36f-0fcfd60cf3aa.pdf
Or look here:
http://swz.salary.com/salarywizard/layouthtmls/swzl_salaryrangenarrowjob_20_SC06.html
Just trying to get a handle on that $200,000 salary & benefits and put it in perspective as preposterous.
Note, you don’t see a lot of burger flippers and chamber maids and counter clerks employed by the State of California so JUST MAYBE that is why the wages seem so high compared to all the Walmart workers and Starbucks barristas out there. Most of these jobs are skilled jobs of some kind, as much as people in the private sector don’t seem to understand that. The guy sitting next to me at work has a Masters degree in Structural Engineer and is paid WAY less than he could earn in the private sector. Don’t ask me why he is here. Probably for the security.
Sorry for the long winded defense of government workers, but my 48-year old work-a-holic boss just suffered a stroke because he takes his work way too seriously and is extremely dedicated.
One of my closest friends at work at Caltrans is a work-a-holic who not only puts in 50-60 hours every week, but always takes work home on the weekends. He doesn’t have any fingernails, he bites them so deep to the quick.
This is why I take it personally when people so casually dismiss all government workers as “parasites”. Yep. 20% are. I wish we could fire them all, but 20% could outpeform most of the people in the private sector. I know... all of you can’t possibly believe that so I’ll just let you believe whatever the hell you want to believe. I’ve know way too many engineers who jumped from Caltrans to private and did just fine, earning more money and doing less work. Again, all of you won’t believe that, and that’s fine.
“Government doesn’t provide services to rich people,” Mike Genest, the state’s finance director, said on a conference call with reporters on Friday. “It doesn’t even really provide services to the middle class.” He added: “You have to cut where the money is.”So basically it's the poor who get the free money, the elected officials who get the votes, the tax paying people get the bills. I wonder when Californians will wake up to what illegals actually costs them?