Don’t you know they’re going to play nice and agree on the golden compromise well before then?

(Ah-nold and the legislature only have the BEST INTERESTS of the people of California at heart.)

What a mess!!!!!

These IOUs are only being issued to employees of the State of California, am I right? What percentage of California’s work force are affected by this?

There must be a bevy of activity right now in California surrounding this issue. What is going on? And why is this mess not receiving more press? It seems to me we have a crisis fomenting that is going to affect all of us (given California’s size and influence) and it’s not being talked about anywhere!

The public employees unions in California in general are very powerful. The prision guard union is really tough. Not even the Terminator turned out to be tough enough for them.

It was not my assertion, nor the assertion of the guest on the Serius interview that public employees make less than private sector employees. That, the guest stated, was the justification of the public employee retirees to justify their huge pensions.

And yes, the guest on Serius did mention that the public employees union was very powerful. Can’t remember for certain, but he might have said they are the most powerful lobby in California.

From my point of view, there’s truth and not-so-true stuff.

One “truth” is that it would be extremely difficult to change these pensions now. The reason is that they are legal “contracts” and voiding a contract is pretty hard. On the other hand, the pensioners at General Motors got their contracts voided … because the other party to the contract went bankrupt. It would be hard for a whole state to be actually and legally “bankrupt”. (I know I used that term in my article – ‘literary license’.) Smaller units of government – cities and counties – have occasionally gone bankrupt. In those cases, the state takes over. In our system of government, states are theoretically “soverign” however and I’m not sure there is any possible mechanism for a whole state to go legally bankrupt.

But California is coming awfully close. It seems to me that the IOU’s actually do violate the strict terms of the contract (pension agreement) because they’re not actually “payment”. They’re a promise of future payment. (I wonder if someone has pursued this through the courts. Maybe we’ll find out if it’s possible for a whole state to go bankrupt.)

The “not-so-true” stuff is the assertion that they might have made more in the private sector. Ummmm … I choose not to believe this.

During most of the employment of your NPR public retiree, the average wage level of public sector employees was, in fact, lower. For example, a 1997 study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics concluded that, “compensation differs between the public sector ($25.73 per hour worked) and the private sector ($17.49 per hour worked)”. I found it very interesting to note that the same study found that, “the incidence of paid sick leave, medical and dental care, and life insurance was much higher among public sector employees than among private sector employees.”

This matches my experience. A very great many (certainly not all) public employees “retire on the job” about as soon as they’re hired. They don’t choose that career path to work. They choose it to avoid work. Most of them probably couldn’t get a job in the private sector in the same career path. (I developed computer software in my career. I hired a lot of people and interacted with programmers working in the public sector occasionally. In general, the public sector programmers I knew just didn’t have the skills.)

One of the reasons prison costs are so high in California is that the public sector employees there have an exceptionally strong and capable union. I mentioned to “RP” above that I have enough material for a “whole ‘nother article about Ah-nold and his flip-flopping”. That’s one of the big places he’s flip-flopped. When he first came into office, he was a bold advocate of revamping the way prisons in California operate – and cutting down the salary cost of the guards who run them. After the prison guard union put together a 10 million dollar war chest to defeat him in the next election, he did a 180 degree turn on this issue. The union remained “neutral” in the election.

This is what I mean by politicians “selling their soul” to get re-elected (the “Gravel Pit Theory”). I’ve written here that California did the right thing to elect Ah-nold originally because he wasn’t a career politician. And that’s right. In his first term, he did go after his priorities. But to get RE-elected, he has caved in on issue after issue after issue. (Somebody else would be in office right now if he had not.) He followed the tried-and-true formula of pandering to the Republican base and not disturbing existing power structures in the re-election.

Even Obama isn’t totally immune. Has he said anything about the corrupt, but very powerful DEMOCRATIC Representative Rangel (or RP’s favorite nemesis, Representative Murphy)? No! (On the other hand, it’s really not Obama’s job to reform Congress. He has his hands full with the Administrative branch of government.)

Here in Color Country, we see the same things happening. For example, the unelected Washington County Water Commission – now digging a tax grave for all of us with the Lake Powell Pipeline project – recently got a new chairman. It’s so interesting that the most qualified candidate just happened to be the son of the former chairman. But when candidates opposed to the Pipeline ran in the last election, they came in a very, very distant second.

People get the government they deserve.

You might note that I didn’t say “Republicans” in the article for exactly that reason. As I’ve noted in other blogs, the Democrats can be as blind and stupid as the Republicans. But, due to California’s initiative-happy way of doing public business, most of the really bad stuff really was a mob psychology operation and not the legislature anyway.

But it gets worse!

Jerry Brown, the DEMOCRAT who is now Attorney General, was responsible for most of this garbage in the first place when he was governor. He’s now appealing the decision by a panel of federal judges that would force California to release 50,000 or so prisioners because keeping them in the overcrowded and underfunded prisons is “cruel and unusual punishment” under the Constitution.

Jerry says it ain’t so. That’s because he’s not there.

And I’ve got enough material for a whole ‘nother article about Ah-nold and his flip-flopping on this issue. It’s a great example of exactly how “The Gravel Pit Theory” works in the real world.