Dems Raid Food Stamps to Pay Off Union Supporters

[Nitrox]

Schoolteachers Driving Cadillacs

by Paul Krugman

 

Jonathan Chait Cohn tells us that public-sector employees are the new welfare queens. Quite: any time you try to talk about the fiscal plight of state and local government, you get spittle-flecked denunciations of unions and their crazy pay packages.

 

So, how much truth is there to this? State and local employees are paid more, on average, than private-sector workers — about 13 percent more, according to this analysis by John Schmitt. But as Schmitt shows, that’s an apples and oranges comparison: state and local workers are much better educated and somewhat older than private-sector workers, and once you correct for that the comparison actually seems to go the other way.

 

I think the easy way to think about this is to realize that about half of state and local workers are teachers and academic administrators — which means that they’re college-educated, at minimum. And think about it: how many ambitious young people do you know saying, “My goal in life is to become a high school teacher — that would put me on easy street”?

 

Yes, firefighters and police get pretty generous pay packages; they also pull people from burning buildings.

 

And here’s a point I haven’t seen made: even if you believe that the age-and-education-adjusted calculations are wrong, and public employees do get paid somewhat more than they “should”, how big a deal is that? I went to the Census state and local finance data, and got this picture of the composition of non-federal government spending:

 

A few percent either way in workers’ compensation would not make a big difference to state and local spending. This is a phony issue.

 

Of course, so were the welfare queens.

 

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/schoolteachers-driving-cadillacs/

 

Oregon is apparently another dramatic outlier relative to the graph, since"...$3 of every $4 state government spends [is]going to salaries and benefits..."

 

http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/08/can_oregon_downsize_state_gove.html

 

Thats a regressive shill site funded by banksters.