3 thoughts on “Sanity In Sacramento?”

  1. I see some people get $750k in wages. Using the power of Google, I see that Chris Edley, the guy who plans to stand firm earned $280k as dean of the Law School at Berkeley. He’s worth every penny.

  2. Well, even in the wildest case, these 200 employees getting their extra $100,000 per year will only cost the state $20 million a year — when the budget shortfall is $20 billion a year.

    I’m afraid I read this is Sacramento grandstanding as usual. By nailing 10 “diversity coordinator” (or whatever) drones at UCOP they’re going to convince us, the taxpayers of California, that they’re “serious” about limiting the State’s hoovering up of every productive dime in California — and therefore we should chip on our share, tighten our belts, and submit to the appalling tax rogering they’re preparing for us later this year.

    Screw them. When I read about ten thousand State employees losing $20,000 a year in pensions, which is real money ($200 million a year), then I’ll start to pay attention. When I read about school administrations suffering 50% cutbacks in staff — my son’s high school has four assistant principals, and only half those on the payroll at the school itself, i.e. not counting those in the separate district administration building, actually teach — then I’ll believe they’re serious. Or let us just take UC: at the local campus less than 10% of the employees teach or do research. We are talking serious fat, somewhere.

    California politics has always centered around the obsession with what the wealthy are doing. That’s why we have an obscene tax structure where about 100,000 people pay the bulk of the bills for a state of 35 million. That must change before things get better. It’s the vast bulk of state drones flying presently under the radar that need to be trimmed, the huge fleets of people making not 0.75 million, but a sweet $90,000 doing nothing essential. It’s not a few hundred pensions over $275,000 that are killing the state, it’s the tens of thousands of pensions of $80,000 plus forever COLAs from age 59 on that are doing the job.

    I’m actually OK if they “raise taxes,” meaning the overall revenue stream increases — but it has to be raising taxes on the poor, so to speak. The tax structure needs to be drastically flattened, so that your poor working mom scraping in $25,000 a year forks over $200, and your student teacher making $45,000 sends in a check for $1,000. Everyone has to pay, at least a little. The days of thinking Silicon Valley stock option taxes could support an endless massive welfare state are over, if they ever were at all.

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