On Tuesday voters in California went the wrong way on three propositions. Voters approved Proposition 30 “temporarily” increasing the state sales tax and income tax on individuals making over $250,000. They voted against Proposition 31 that would allow the governor to cut the budget in fiscal emergencies. They voted against Proposition 32 that would prevent...
California state controller John Chiang has unveiled a website that tracks public employee pay. Unfortunately, the website provides grossly misleading information. The data compiled and summarized on this website report average wages that are literally one half to one-third the amount of total compensation actually earned by California’s state and local public servants. The impact...
Campaign Funding IBEW Union Boss Brian d’Arcy, the imperious business manager of the Department of Water and Power’s politically powerful and domineering union, is not a happy camper with Mayor Riordan’s proposed plan to reform the DWP’s very generous and seriously unfunded pension plan. How dare Riordan try to circumvent him? After all, DWP is...
Editor’s Note: Apart from pensions, the most financially significant “OPEB,” or “other post employment benefit,” typically awarded a government employee is retirement health care. This benefit is designed to fill the health coverage gap during the years between when someone retires and when they become eligible for Medicare, and in many cases, they are also...
I just finished slogging through a 69 page PDF by the State Budget Crisis Task Force outlining the dire state of affairs in Illinois. I knew in advance that pension funding is the biggest issue facing Illinois. The task force shows exactly that. Here is a summary. Pension Funding Levels Teachers Retirement System (TRS) –...
Workers for the city of Stockton who attended the unveiling Wednesday night of a new report detailing trends in public-employee compensation in California complained about cuts in their compensation packages that are causing hardship for them and their city. But the report, prepared on behalf of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Foundation and released at a...
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” George Orwell, Animal Farm Public sector unions, who have now raised over $50 million to defeat California’s Prop. 32, have called it the “Special Exemptions Act,” because it supposedly was deliberately written to exempt billionaires and certain business interests from its provisions. The...
If California voters grant the state government the billions in higher taxes in Proposition 30 that Gov. Jerry Brown and legislative Democrats have been demanding, those same officials might be expected to squander the money by shoveling even more benefits to already well-compensated government workers. Evidence for such an expectation is a scheme to enrich...
A recently released study by the California Public Policy Center (CPPC) entitled “Costa Mesa, California – City Employee Compensation Analysis,” using actual payroll data provided by the city, has calculated the average total annual compensation for an employee of that city to be $146,863 during 2011. Anyone wishing to review their calculations can download the...
The California hit parade keeps on rolling as yet Another California city scrambles to avoid bankruptcy. Atwater, a city of roughly 28,000 in California’s Central Valley, may declare a fiscal emergency as soon as next week, but it is trying to avoid becoming the fourth California city to file for municipal bankruptcy this year, its...
A summary of California State Finances for August 2012 looks like this: Except for corporate income taxes (down a whopping 71.5% vs. projections), the state is doing better in August than budgeted. However, compared to a year ago, revenues are down, sales taxes are down, and corporate taxes are down, all by significant amounts. Moreover,...
Yes, this is an incredible statistic. But only one assumption is necessary to generate this shocking result – just assume that pension funds will only earn 4.5% per year instead of 7.5% per year. If you wish to cling to the utterly absurd belief that over the long-term, decade after decade, pension funds can achieve...
On August 31st the San Jose Mercury’s editorial board saw fit to denounce Prop. 32, a California citizen’s initiative that will appear on the state ballot in November, as a “scam,” because the initiative would ban payroll deductions for political contributions (ref. “Deceptive Prop. 32 would worsen campaign finance mess“). The editors reason that since...
City officials across California typically spare police officers from even modest reductions in the pay and pension packages that are a leading cause of municipal budget problems, even when the alternatives are reduced public services or even municipal bankruptcy. The common explanation is that politicians are afraid of the cop unions’ political muscle. That is...