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Good comment. I just did a quick google for the government employee premium - I was thinking specifically about California since that's the state economy I know

Good comment. I just did a quick google for the government employee premium - I was thinking specifically about California since that's the state economy I know most about. Their spending on salaries, benefits, and pensions was crazy. Lots of good analysis about California's problems - Heritage wasn't actually the link I was looking for, I saw a different specific analysis but that one came up in Google first and was close enough to give a general idea. Edit: Also, the article mixes federal and state spending. Their examples of high spending they think are wasteful are all federal - bank bailouts, assuming private debt like General Motors, and wars are all federal spending.

aamar 16y ago
For some reason I don't see discussion of federal spending in the Salon article or the cited NYTimes article, except for a few offhand comments in the former which seem suggestive, not substantive (e.g. rumors about what the Deficit Commission may propose 4 months from now). Why am I missing them? I agree about California; there seems to be plenty of evidence of exceedingly high salaries and pensions. Administrators might reasonably claim that they raised comp in order to hire top talent (for example at the UCs) and that they were successful in doing so. But they ratcheted up way past levels that could be sustained in a downturn, and at this point it seems short-sighted to the point of crazy.