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State and local governments are, as far as I can tell, simultaneously spending way too much money and are badly understaffed in certain areas. Sometimes even wh

State and local governments are, as far as I can tell, simultaneously spending way too much money and are badly understaffed in certain areas. Sometimes even while appearing well-staffed, because there's some bottleneck elsewhere in the system (due to insufficient staffing there) preventing the efforts of an army of other frontline workers from being effective. Like the elevator inspector thing—you may have more than enough electrical inspectors but not enough elevator inspectors, so, the extra electrical inspectors can't improve the situation. Of course the pay's shit, you're subject to all kinds of quality-of-work-life destroying whims of politicians at the top, the bureaucracy is as abusive and ineffective as stereotypes about bureaucracies would lead one to expect, and if you have an effective union shielding you from some of that, about half the politicians are constantly trying to weaken or eliminate that, plus trying to mess with your pension which is practically the only attractive thing about those jobs... so, no fucking wonder, really. Recent wage inflation has made all this stuff worse by making unresponsive government pay scales far less attractive than market-driven wages elsewhere, so systems and offices that were teetering before are now falling over.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
> State and local governments are, as far as I can tell, simultaneously spending way too much money and are badly understaffed in certain areas. Shouldn't be a mystery. In many states and localities a massive portion of spending goes to pensions.
zbrozek 4y ago
They might also simply be exerting too much oversight. The other way to reduce these pressures is to reduce workloads by simply caring less. I'm doing a remodel and I got three pages of comments that were 90% about minor annotation issues that won't make any difference to anything on the ground ever. But it burned tens of hours of plan checker time.
lotsofpulp 4y ago
>the politicians are constantly trying to weaken or eliminate that, plus trying to mess with your pension which is practically the only attractive thing about those jobs... so, no fucking wonder, really. >Recent wage inflation has made all this stuff worse by making unresponsive government pay scales far less attractive than market-driven wages elsewhere, so systems and offices that were teetering before are now falling over. These two are related. The pensions work for government workers because politicians get to advertise low taxes, voters get to enjoy lower taxes and punt the costs to future generations, and union bosses who are older, get to cash out before shit hits the fan (almost all governments have tiers of pensions, where older workers have more benefits than younger will ever have). The solution is to get rid of ALL deferred compensation. Government pays employees the same as private does. No more muddying the waters with understated liability numbers and underfunding for deferred compensation. Then government can match wages in real time.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

> State and local governments are, as far as I can tell, simultaneously spending way too much money and are badly understaffed in certain areas. Shouldn't be a mystery. In many states and localities a massive portion of spending goes to pensions.

zbrozek 4y ago

They might also simply be exerting too much oversight. The other way to reduce these pressures is to reduce workloads by simply caring less. I'm doing a remodel and I got three pages of comments that were 90% about minor annotation issues that won't make any difference to anything on the ground ever. But it burned tens of hours of plan checker time.

lotsofpulp 4y ago

>the politicians are constantly trying to weaken or eliminate that, plus trying to mess with your pension which is practically the only attractive thing about those jobs... so, no fucking wonder, really. >Recent wage inflation has made all this stuff worse by making unresponsive government pay scales far less attractive than market-driven wages elsewhere, so systems and offices that were teetering before are now falling over. These two are related. The pensions work for government workers because politicians get to advertise low taxes, voters get to enjoy lower taxes and punt the costs to future generations, and union bosses who are older, get to cash out before shit hits the fan (almost all governments have tiers of pensions, where older workers have more benefits than younger will ever have). The solution is to get rid of ALL deferred compensation. Government pays employees the same as private does. No more muddying the waters with understated liability numbers and underfunding for deferred compensation. Then government can match wages in real time.