[quote=livinincali][quote=CA renter]
Just to be clear, most public employees have not had net raises since about 2008. Many (if not most) are actually making less than they were in 2008, and when you take the pension reform into consideration, they will probably end up making about 10-20% less in the next few years than they were making in 2008, and that is NOT taking into account the other concessions that were being made as the economy slowed.
Not sure where the info is coming from WRT public employees getting raises. Most new contracts are keeping compensation the same, or reducing it. With the pension reform that has already passed, it is a definite double-digit percentage net loss for most employees from ~2008 levels.[/quote]
I’ve been talking wages and BENEFITS. While the compensation the employee sees may remain the same the cost to employee that person has gone up since 2008.
For starters medical benefits have been increasing somewhere between 5 and 10% per year so a $50K employee with a $10K medical benefit that goes up 10% ends up increasing the employee’s compensation by nearly 2%. The fact that the costs of employing somebody are hidden from the person that is employed is one of the biggest problems in society. You should know exactly how much you cost your employer and yet almost everybody doesn’t know.
Second while the city did do pension reform everything else is grandfathered in so as the city’s pension performance continues to lag we have to pay ever increasing amounts to the pension program. This is another cost of employing somebody that is going up and the employee doesn’t see it yet is has to come out of the tax base.
The last issue is that if you look at 10 years of tax data (I found CA from 2000 to 2010) you’ll see an increase of about 24% in the tax base. Of course when you go look at something like CA average teacher salaries for the past 10 years and they increased almost 30% (without the benefit increase included) and you see why we have a problem. Total compensation for public sector workers has been increasing faster than the tax base and that’s why we have so many problems.[/quote]
You need to go further back than that. If you look at 2000 numbers, you’ll note that these numbers are totally off from historical norms, and that is why the pension boosts, etc. were able to pass. The government employers were contributing very little (many/most were contributing NOTHING) toward pension contributions because of the stock market bubble. Those numbers were an anomaly, they were not the norm — not by a long shot.
If you look at the historical tables of pension contributions, you’ll see that today’s rates, while a bit higher as a result of the financial crisis caused by WALL STREET, are very much in line with historical norms.
You are right about the medical costs, though. That could easily be solved by creating a national healthcare system. We, the taxpayers, already pay for the most expensive patients through Medicare, Medicaid, and child welfare programs. We’ve given all the profitable/inexpensive patients to the private sector. What we’ve done is, once again, privatized the profits and socialized the losses…and then people complain about “welfare.” No kidding.
