Remember, it was Gray Davis that gave them the 90% gift when he tried to bribe the LE unions to vote for him.

It is also abhorrent to pay a first year CHP about twice what a doctor makes starting out at Loma Linda Medical Center. About 48k as of 2009.

They do not provide much needed services unless you consider writing tickets, an average $450.00 a pop, to collect revenue for the state much needed services.They are currently the highest paid traffic cops in the world and so are CA corrections officers for the record.

Another over paid category are the worthless appointees to commissions which average 250k a year each.This one really gets my under wear in a wad.

BTW-Thanks for the links, very illuminating yet depressing info.

ScottyDog on October 26, 2009 at 2:12 PM

Rather than cut pay or benefits for emergency workers and peace officers, I want to cut the number of personnel employed by the state, period. And by that I mean get rid of departments and commissions, administrative personnel and bureaucrats. We don’t need nearly as many administrators as there are in the educational bureaucracy OR the environmental compliance bureaucracy, and there’s a whole bunch of stuff — Lockyer’s “junk” — we don’t need at all.

Here are a couple of links if you’re interested. I did an analysis of what California is spending money on back during the budget battle this spring, and it’s amazing what you find when you investigate. Pensions for state employees performing the traditional, needed public services that we all benefit from aren’t nearly the budget gorilla people think they are. The incredible amount we spend on administering education, commissioning research from the universities, employing people to lecture us on our toilet-flushing and driving habits, and beating the bushes for new entitlement beneficiaries — that’s what we need to be worrying about.

The other link is to this reader response , which goes into remarkable depth on the pathology of welfarism in California. California spent more than twice its pension budget on state welfare programs in the last fiscal year — and this reader had first-hand insight into how that’s going for us.

I have no interest whatever in even looking at what we’re paying the people who actually provide tangible services for us, until we’ve looked into all the absolute BS our tax dollars are going to. It’s mind-boggling.

Things should get really interesting next year when the budget in CA gets even worse (lower tax revenues due to unemployment and lackluster stock market gains) and the very union employees see either steep pay cuts/furloughs, or layoffs. California may even have to raid the PERS/STRS retirement systems for cash, which will really tick off the union folks.

In the wings we have Jerry Brown and SF Mayor Gavin Newsome running for governor on the left and Meg Whitman (“I love that guy Van Jones – he’s very impressive”) who never found it worthwhile to vote during her adult life and Steve Poizner on the right.

CA has the union situation as described in detail in other comments plus a large portion of the population that votes but doesn’t pay taxes that determine our election outcomes. I am not very optimistic that Bill Lockyer’s admonishments will be taken seriously any time soon.

For your viewing pleasure, we present to you (via Ensign Ed) Bill Lockyer:     My friends, that man is, or is going to be, every non-Marxist Democrat INSIDE the Beltway by the time November 2010 rolls around – if they……

J.E. Dyer on October 26, 2009 at 1:47 PM

Do you actually think it is fair to pay the police pensions of 90 percent? Many of these people can make more money by retiring than by working with these windfall pensions.

A California Highway Patrol Officer with a GED can start at $110,000 a year. Doctors do not make that kind of money to start.

It is impossible to keep paying these outrageous pensions and salaries as they are the reason the state is going bankrupt.It is a pyramid scheme that is going to explode.

The public employee unions are holding the taxpayers hostage to their ever increasing demands for higher pay even when we are in a recession.

The fact is all of the state workers are over paid, they make approximately 40% more than private industry across the board.

California could pay excellent pensions for peace officers and emergency workers and teachers without even breaking a sweat. What the state doesn’t need is all the bureaucrats, many of them earning over $100K a year sitting around thinking about ways to regulate and fee us to death, and then retiring at pensions near their late-career salaries.

The state has become the employer of first resort for a number of “professions” that have little traction in the private sector, and that produce expensive constraints on the people rather than making anything better for us. It’s in this area that we need to stop spending on “good ideas.” This is where the junk is — not in pensions for the people who perform real services for the citizenry.

I have ZERO interest in cutting pensions for the firemen who keep fires away from my home even when I can see the fires from my driveway, and have my bags packed and my important documents ready to throw in the car for days while those firemen are out there sweating in the most awful conditions for hours at a time to keep the flames from getting to me. Don’t even tell me these guys need their pensions cut, or that the police, highway patrol, or teachers do.

But eliminate whole state bureaucracies that are dedicated to preventing California’s water infrastructure from actually collecting and distributing more water? Bureaucracies whose answer to everything is “Make the people pay more to have and use less”? Sign me up! That’s where the hatchet needs to fall.

California shows latinos and US dont work

PrezHussein on October 24, 2009 at 4:58 PM

This is stupid and wrong. Latinos, insofar as they’re willing to come here legally, do their jobs, and pay taxes, are just fine.

Plenty of them do just that.

Idiots. All of them.

If the state GOP doesn’t have this clip in ads by the end of next week, maybe California needs better GOP leadership, too.

Ya think?

The GOP in California CREATED the current state Democrat majority. The GOP party leaders HATE conservative Republicans. They had the majority in the ’90s and they fought each other so much they got nothing done. They just made asses of themselves on every issue.

California’s Republicans were a decade ahead of the national party just like the Cal Dems have spent a decade working up the template for Pelosi/Reid incompetence and the coming Federal bankruptcy.

If you see California pulling out in the next decade or so take that as a glimmer of hope.

“Making Government more efficient” means hiring fewer Government workers. It means smaller departments, which means it means making existing managers less important (since the standard gauge of worth is “how many people work for you?”, or else “how big is the budget you manage?”), it means less money for teh government employee unions, and less money to the people who donate money to Legislators (since if you’re looking for government contracts, donating to politicians is one of the basic costs of doing business).

It’s why you should never, ever, ever vote for a Democrat, and why big government Republicans are as bad, if not worse: the only thing that’s going to lead to government “efficiency” is having Legislators who, at a personal and philosophical level, believe that big government is bad, and so are willing to work at every possible opportunity to make it smaller.

Schwarzenegger taken a deep breath, he might have noted that his failure had been primarily tactical in nature. However worthy his reform agenda may have been, creating a political atmosphere that united all of California’s powerful special-interest groups — especially the state’s public-sector unions — was a recipe for disaster.

Arnold could have passed any one of his initiatives with ease, the one that had the greatest support and the greatest immediate impact would have been constraining state employees’ unions’ political activity.

Instead of taking on his adversaries in detail, get the unions under control, then redistricting, then budget discipline etc. he rolled the dice on one big action-movie finale, and he got stomped.

At which point he flipped over and essentially turned Democrat. Lots of feel-good climate-fraud legislation.

We are fortunate, at least, that we’ve got some quirky laws that keep a lid on the state’s ability to tax. Otherwise we’d be New Jersey, or worse.

A substantial segment of the Dems would love to see a constitutional convention; they see hijacking the process and rewriting the state constitution as their way to completely restructure tax collection in the state, clearing out the protections currently afforded by (the imperfect but necessary) Prop 13 and the 2/3-vote requirement for the legislature to pass a budget (and you can bet they’ll try to get rid of the initiative/referendum/recall mechanism while they’re at it.)

There may be any number of things wrong with the state constitution, but the current contingent of spendthrift Democrats and supine Republicans will only make the situation worse.

I’ve been bloviating for well over 10 years now about public retirement benefits and how eventually those obligations will sink this state. It’s nice to see others finally paying attention as well. (I first soured on Schwarzenegger when he totally blew his chance to bring public pensions under at least a modicum of control.) You simply cannot have people whose elections depend on money and votes from public employees and their unions sitting across the negotiating table from those same unions. It’s just insane. Lockyer is right, but where has he been all these years?

There’s a movie coming out next month called 2012 in which that happens. See how many people in the theater cheer when that goes down.

How else to explain the delusion that Californians could be taxed like libertarians, but subsidized like socialists? The result, of course, has been a fiscal crisis addressed with slashed spending on public services and increased taxes in the midst of a deep recession — a recipe for yet more discord and trouble. In a grim irony, Californians are now being taxed like socialists and subsidized like libertarians. [...]

Schwarzenegger called for a special election focused on four ballot initiatives that he claimed were necessary to clean up state government…the psychic trauma of being decisively rejected at the ballot box proved overwhelming. Had Schwarzenegger taken a deep breath, he might have noted that his failure had been primarily tactical in nature. However worthy his reform agenda may have been, creating a political atmosphere that united all of California’s powerful special-interest groups — especially the state’s public-sector unions — was a recipe for disaster. But Schwarzenegger made matters worse by hyperventilating in the wake of his embarrassing defeat. The man who had once slammed his opponents as “girlie men” took to the stage of the Beverly Hilton on election night and declared, “The people of California are sick and tired of all the fighting.” It was about as bizarre as political transformations get. Almost exactly two years to the day after his inauguration, the governor of America’s largest state was presiding over the public execution of his own mandate. [...]

There is little in President Obama’s legislative agenda that hasn’t already been tried in California.

Or…

California Reamin’
Posted in Where Do We Go from Here? by Noel
Sep 08 2009

“We have just turned over to a new administration in Sacramento a government virtually the same size it was eight years ago. With the state’s growth rate, this means that government absorbed a workload increase, in some departments as much as 66 percent. We also turned over — for the first time in almost a quarter of a century — a balanced budget and a surplus of $500 million. In these eight years just passed, we returned to the people in rebates, tax reductions and bridge toll reductions $5.7 billion.”–Gov. Ronald Reagan, 1975

For decades in California, ANY candidate that is not beholding to one or more of these groups is attacked with massive negative advertising paid for by these three groups. For Democrats, the attacks start in the primaries. Republicans are typically attacked later.

As long as an UNEDUCATED population exists in California that BELIEVES the LIES slammed in their faces DAILY during ANY election cycle, these voters will continue to vote against those evil people that want to ‘destroy the entire school system’, ‘eliminate critically needed social programs for the starving children’, and ‘kill every last thing that mother nature ever created’.

This is what California elections have devolved into. Discussions about how terrible anyone is that does not march in lockstep for the absolute and total control by one or more of these three special interest groups.

And predictably, the carpetbagging Democrat candidate, Lt Gov J Garamendi, that Obama came out here to raise money for last week, is now running attack ads against his almost unknown Republican opponent, David Harmer. Many voters will only ever see the attack ads as Harmer has a tiny budget.