Yes, public employees are tax payers but by and large they are overhead and a burden from an economic perspective.
Those public employees are the ones who build your roads and infrastructure; ensure you have clean water, food and air; come to your rescue if you have an accident or get extremely sick; keep you safer from criminals; protect your house and loved ones if there is a fire, natural disaster or hazardous materials accident; teach you and your children, etc. Not sure how you justify your claim that they are a “burden”. I’d say Wall Street and related idiots are a much more significant burden than public employees ever were!
Gov’t workers in the State of California are in no small way bankrupting the state. Ofcourse, part of the reason we have so many state (and local) gov’t workers is also because of our socialist legislature.
The bulk of our spending goes to education, health and social services, youth and adult corrections, and transportation.
A huge part of that spending is a direct result of illegal immigration, which means that we are essentially subsidizing the private industry that employs illegal immigrants and fails to provide these benefits and won’t pay them enough to privately educate their children.
Now, you can argue that the money goes to public employees who provide these services to illegal immigrants, and that would be correct. But you cannot solve the problem of “too many public employees” until you solve the problem of illegal immigration (and the private businesses who profit as a result of our largesse).
