Galt's Gulch

California's woes summed up by a simple economic indicator

Posted by $ blarman 11 years, 1 month ago to Culture
11 comments | Share | Flag

How much does the average municipal worker make in comparison to the average taxpayer?

Therein lies the prime cause of California's budget woes.
SOURCE URL: http://humanevents.com/2015/01/02/salary-info-shows-fruits-of-union-muscle/?utm_source=hedaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

Add Comment

FORMATTING HELP

All Comments Hide marked as read Mark all as read

  • Comment hidden by post owner or admin, or due to low comment or member score. View Comment
  • Posted by Robbie53024 11 years, 1 month ago
    It's fallacious to look at average salaries as the metric. It is proper to look at salaries for similar work - say gov't accountants and private sector accountants, or gov't laborers and private sector laborers. Gov't tends to have a higher percent of white collar jobs, which typically have higher salaries. That isn't universal, of course.

    Where there is a dramatic discrepancy is in the benefits for public workers compared to private sector. In many locales, gov't workers pay little or even nothing for their retirement programs and qualify for full benefits while relatively young, young enough for a second job - often back in gov't (double dipping). And since they qualify so young, the length of time that they receive those benefits is longer as well. That itself may be the biggest issue.
    Reply | Mark as read | Best of... | Permalink  
      -
    • Posted by edweaver 11 years, 1 month ago
      Do you really think average salaries of government workers should be higher than that of the people paying their wage?

      Personally, I believe that is one of the reasons property taxes are so far out of line. The vast majority of governments expense is labor and when the average wage is higher that the payers it creates issues with people's ability to pay. Also, in the private sector, benefits are considered part of the pay package and so should it be in government.



      Reply | Mark as read | Parent | Best of... | Permalink  
      • Comment hidden by post owner or admin, or due to low comment or member score. View Comment
      • Posted by Robbie53024 11 years, 1 month ago
        Depends on what they are doing. I would expect an accountant to have a higher pay than a laborer (skills matter). But for similar skill sets, I would expect total compensation (pay and benefits and qualification for retirement) to be similar.
        Reply | Mark as read | Parent | Best of... | Permalink  
      -
    • Posted by $ blarman 11 years, 1 month ago
      If you are looking at averages, however, isn't the one going to mirror the other? The vast majority of government employees aren't CPA's in the Budget office. And while I agree that their wage rates should be comparable to the private sector, that too should even out when taken on aggregate. California's aren't even close.

      The biggest problem I see are the government pension plans. Those need to be privatized and individualized so that politicians don't have that money to use as a slush fund.
      Reply | Mark as read | Parent | Best of... | Permalink  
      • Comment hidden by post owner or admin, or due to low comment or member score. View Comment
      • Posted by Robbie53024 11 years, 1 month ago
        I always avoid averages, as they most always lead one astray (I work in process improvement and deal with statistical data). Conceptual example - put one hand in a pot of boiling water and the other in a bowl of ice water. On average things are fine, but we don't feel the "average" we feel the variation.
        Reply | Mark as read | Parent | Best of... | Permalink  
          -
        • Posted by $ blarman 11 years, 1 month ago
          I understand what you are trying to say, but we're talking about standard deviations, and those are going to tighten up substantially as your sample size increases. In a sample of two or three, the standard deviation is massive. In a sample size of a couple million, not so much.
          Reply | Mark as read | Parent | Best of... | Permalink  
          • Comment hidden by post owner or admin, or due to low comment or member score. View Comment
          • Posted by Robbie53024 11 years, 1 month ago
            Um, not to be argumentative or overly picky, but that's not correct. The confidence interval of same will tighten up as the amount of data increases, but the actual value will be whatever it is.
            Reply | Mark as read | Parent | Best of... | Permalink  
              -
            • Posted by $ blarman 11 years, 1 month ago
              True, but the confidence interval is an indicator of how representative the average is of the general trend, is it not? And standard deviations represent the volume of a population in proximity to the mean. I understand the need to examine the method of study/evaluation, but if you want to persuade me that the argument made by the author is severely flawed, you're going to have to provide better data to support your position - not merely attack the methodology.

              If we compare the average of government salary and wages against the average of citizen salary and wages and find a significant discrepancy, we absolutely should make sure we are not comparing apples and oranges - I'm not trying to argue that. But prima facie it seems pretty reasonable to me to expect that if you include the entire range of public servants' salaries and benefits and compare them to the entire range of private salaries, the indications of a market-based system would argue that the two distributions would be similar - the one being a subset of the other. If a disparity existed, it would be an indicator that one of the two systems was not representative of a market-based system.
              Reply | Mark as read | Parent | Best of... | Permalink  
              • Comment hidden by post owner or admin, or due to low comment or member score. View Comment
              • Posted by Robbie53024 11 years, 1 month ago
                No. The confidence interval takes into account the variation of the data and how confident you want to be in that prediction. The higher the confidence, the larger the area needed to be included so as to also include all possible values. The standard dev or avg is merely a mathematical, and deterministic value, whereas the confidence interval is probabilistic.

                The problem is that gov't employees have a higher preponderance of "white collar" types of jobs than does the overall population. There are next to zero "minimum wage jobs" in gov't, especially at the federal level. So it really is apples and oranges.
                Reply | Mark as read | Parent | Best of... | Permalink  
                • Posted by $ blarman 11 years, 1 month ago
                  So show me the apples and show me the oranges. You really want to claim that clerks at the courthouse or DMV rate the wages (and benefits) of a four-year Business degree? Or that school administrators warrant a six-figure salary (and benefits)? That's a pretty tough sell in my book. I'm not saying they have to be equivalent across the board, but the differentiation is SO big that to claim justification based on free market dynamics is ridiculous. If it were the free market, the company known as "California" would have been forced to declare bankruptcy more than a decade ago at least. Instead, they keep paying outrageous salaries and racking up huge deficits in promised benefits liabilities that they can't pay for despite the fact that they have the highest taxes in the nation (except for New York).
                  Reply | Mark as read | Parent | Best of... | Permalink  

FORMATTING HELP

  • Comment hidden. Undo