Gov.-elect Jerry Brown has an enormous burden on his shoulders -- a $25 billion state budget deficit -- and seriously limited options in his quest to eliminate it. His best potential allies: California voters.
Brown appears to be leaning strongly toward proposing a special election next year in which voters will be asked to either approve new taxes to help close the gap, or accept a state government that offers far less in the way of services -- many we take for granted...
...The problem is startlingly vast: The budget gap, Brown says, outstrips combined annual spending on public assistance, corrections and the state's two public college systems.
Here's a really cool idea. It's one I borrowed from the real world. Spend less than you take in. To put it in terms California's Democrats can understand: it's, like, what the rest of us have to do. Dude.
Oh, and here's one place you can start.
[With retirement, health care, extra vacation and paid time off, you can] apply a 56% overhead rate to an average [public sector] base salary of $68,500, you arrive at a total compensation estimate for the average state or local government worker in California of $106,860 per year. As also explored in the earlier post, “Public Employee Compensation,” the average private sector worker’s total compensation in California is estimated at $57,000 per year – probably well under that, since the data sets used did not include self-employed individuals...
...There are solutions that would go a long way towards solving these problems, such as implementing pay and benefit cuts that target the most highly compensated, most overpaid strata of the public workforce, or streamlining top-heavy bureaucracies and cutting costs from the top down instead of from the bottom up, or, gasp, making pay-cuts more palatable to public employees by reinventing the regulatory environment to actually lower the cost of living in California.
Dare to dream, folks. Dare to dream.
Interesting....where did you get the overhead burden rate of 56%? Reason I ask that a well run private company with well funded benefits approximates 38-40%. Damn nice that...
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