Some Observations on the budget problem

Everyone is pointing the finger at everyone else these days concerning budget cuts.  Republicans often want to just cut everything in sight (other than defense of course).  I am generally a guy who believes that Government does a lot of good things, but Republican notions are getting a lot of traction because of Democrats lack of desire to start addressing some serious problems with the way we have allowed Government to be infected by private sector thinking over the decades.


Here are a couple observations after some quick online searches.


When legislators directly accountable to voters set pay:
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff probably makes somewhere between $230,000 and $250,000 a year - its difficult to tell exactly because military pay structures follow a formula that is very complex.
The President of the United States makes $400,000 a year.


Yet - In California (for example) where State employees or Commissions unaccountable to voters usually set pay:


The President of the University of California made $591,000 a year in 2010.


About 10 State Employees in the Dept of Corrections made over $500,000 a year in 2010 - twice as much as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.


399 State employees made more than $400,000 a year in 2010 - more than the President of the United States.


The employee salary boards and commissions unaccountable to the voters have two big problems:
1.  Their primary comparison is with equivalent private sector salaries, yet the market mechanism that control the private sector are absent in the public sector.  
2.  The Boards and Commissions are mostly comprised of ambitious people who are setting precedents they think might apply to them at some point.


The justification for rapidly escalating salaries is that paying the most insures you get the best people.  In my experience the notion high pay produces the best public servants is hogwash.  When you use that as the criteria what you get is the people who are most interested in making money for themselves crowding out the applicants who are more interested in public service than building a resume.  


Think of the University of California as an example.  It was, 30 or 40 years ago, a model of an affordable State University.  Over the last couple decades the increase in tuition and fees associated with going to college has consistently run far above inflation, to the point that now many students cannot afford to attend without taking on an enormous debt burden.   Even with the tuition increases 31% of the new students at UC Berkeley will not be from California.  They will be from out of the State or out of the Country because the University needs the much higher tuition paid by out of state students.  


Sure the University has suffered major budget cuts over the course of nearly a decade.  But for decades what gets cut consistently seems to be on the the public services side of the equation.  


I am seeing a perfect example of the way it works here in Berkeley where I live.  The adult school ESL program is figuring out how to deal with major funding cuts.  A close friend who teaches at the adult school was concerned about what sounded like major program cuts that would undermine the mission of the program.  She attended a meeting to discuss the budget cuts.  She was astounded to learn that the administrators had requested the teachers union come up with a plan for teachers to make major changes in the way the program was run (and as the teachers are mostly hourly employee's - cuts in their compensation).  But no similar request was made to the administrators union, the clerical union or the custodial union.  In other words, only the actual teaching services were being asked to figure out how to do it cheaper.  In response to a question, the administrators at one point said simply no cuts were being considered for administrative staff.   As one speaker drolly observed, they may not have any money for classes for students on Fridays, but the administrators, clerical people and janitor's would all still be working.


If money buys competence how did the United States Military become the most professional and competent military in the world?  They have managed to achieve that distinction with pay schedules that pay people peanuts compared to private sector salary's.  The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a position one would think is certainly as challenging as any job in the world, makes less than hundreds, or thousands of other government employee's, and less than 1/2 of what many California Prison Officials or University administrators make.


We need pay schedules for all government employee's that divorce government salaries from comparison with the private sector so the people who want to be public servants can serve the public and the people who love money will take their ambitions into the private sector.