[quote]PlnrBoy, if public employees are so qualified as you say, they can easily find alternative employment in the private sector. Nobody is stopping them.

It’s not a question of what we should pay but what we can afford to pay public employees. It’s not just how much we pay them, but how public employees we should have. [/quote]

Right now they obviously can’t find alternative employment, there isn’t any. But sooner or later the economy will recover. When that happens, qualified public employees will jump ship and new positions will be hard to fill. We can close the budget in the short run, but that model of development would be unsustainable.

In the end, we should decide what we want to have and decide how we want to pay. Do we want to keep the honor of having one of the lowest effective property taxes in the nation, or do we want to start spending more on K-12 per pupil than Iowa? Do we want to imitate Texas by cutting welfare spending, if it means, say, a 50% higher crime rate?