I agree with you sdduude. I don’t like skulduggery with public money, nor kickbacks. And I don’t like unions, sorry.

I did like your dike example though. 🙂

I think if you take the top 20 folks in almost any endeavor, a cursory glance at their salaries would be surprising, and you might initially think they were shockingly unjustified. Imagine what the top 20 plastic surgeons make…

But isn’t this called “selection bias”? Of course the numbers were large, they were the top 20! What about all the rest of the folks? How many folks are drawing a pension from the city of SD? 100,000? 500,000? What’s the mean and standard deviation of their payouts?

Now of course that’s much less sensational and less fun to grouse about, but statistically more relevant I think.

I think we need to be careful when considering making policy decisions based on some small number of folks we want to “target”. That’s how you end up with things like the AMT.