News Flash!!!
Government employees pay taxes!
This is apparently unknown to the general public, that working for the government doesn’t exclude you from the tax rolls.
When people would tell me “I pay your salary”, my response was, “We have that in common, SIR, because my taxes pay my salary too.” I would then continue to process them in the manner prescribed by law, because I like my employees to do their job. 😈
Here’s another News Flash: Elected officials make the decisions on what public money is spent on, not public employees. If you don’t like the choices, blame the voters who elected those officials.
I realize that elected officials avoid taking responsibility for their actions, and will blame everything that goes wrong on “bureaucrats”, but get a grip – all government expenditures are approved initially by the elected officials. If they don’t approve the budget, there is no money to spend.
Take some responsibility people – you elected these clowns, so it’s your fault.
8 comments
Tell me about it Bryan! It galls me how public servants are portrayed as idle pen pushers on inflated salaries and gold plated pensions. It’s a description better directed at our political masters.
It turns out that the pensions are “goldish”, and spray painted, not plated, if you can hang on long enough to get one. The pens tend to be used for suicide or homicide when the individual has had enough.
“Going postal” is an Americanism for workplace violence, after a number of postal service employees snapped and shot up their work sites. The post office is constantly under attack for being inefficient and wasteful, which is not supported by any facts, just opinions.
There is a widely held belief that you can’t fire people on civil service. Having personally fired a number of people, I know that to be untrue. The procedure to fire someone is just as plodding and mind-numbing as most government personnel regulations, but it is in the manual and if you follow it the results aren’t even in question. All you really need is cause, the individual must have done something in violation of the rules, or not done something that is required by their job. No, you can’t fire them because you don’t like them, which is what the Republicans don’t like. The biggest problem is that the political appointees promote incompetents to supervisory positions and they can’t understand the regulations, or are too lazy to do the necessary work. “You can’t fire people on civil service” is an excuse not a reality.
Public employees are used as scapegoats by politicians to avoid having to admit that they caused the problems.
When I worked for a state, before they would hire me, they made sure I was up to date on my taxes. That was a surprise. Luckily, my taxes were up to date:)
Yes, you have to be up-to-date on taxes, and they check for a criminal record, and they look at credit reports. You have to jump through all kinds of hoops and have absurd qualifications and then they don’t pay worth talking about.
One of the big draws was that you had job security, but that isn’t true anymore. You are just as apt to be laid off working for the government, as working for anyone else.
Job security, Ha! Our governmental rabble are planning to shed 500,000 public sector jobs. My former department, the Home Office (Police, Counter Terrorism and Immigration) is set to lose up to a third of jobs. Unfortunately the baseline for these cuts required a 10% cut to get to the starting line so they offered moderately god voluntary redundancy terms this year.
Which is why I’m writing this post at 0947! I thought better to go with a moderate settlement than be turfed out with a crap one in a couple of years time
It is always the best policy to get out when the getting is good, rather than waiting and being part of the flood of out of work people. You might have a shot at a job early, but the later group will be a bit desperate and force down wages.
They are going to move Britain back to the recession with their cutting, but you can’t explain it to them.
During my recent job search I looked at the State of California as a possible employer. Yes, despite a “hiring freeze” for most of the Governator’s administration, they’re still hiring IT people. A look at the salaries on offer showed me why — I’d have to take a 40% salary cut to work for the State. And I’d have to take a civil service test that had nothing to do with the job on offer, and it was only offered four times a year, and it had already happened for this quarter so I wouldn’t even be in the applicant pool until, well, now (2 1/2 months into my new job).
As far as the “gold plated pension” is concerned: 1) When paying into the state pension fund you’re not paying into Social Security. Combined with the 40% lower salary, the state pension ends up being around the same as Social Security would be. And California has “generous” state pension benefits. 2) Social Security has a “double dipper” provision that reduces your Social Security benefits if you’re getting a state pension, I ran the numbers and found that adding this up compared to staying private and paying Social Security taxes would be an awesome $220/month difference in retirement.
So yes, the total pension plus Social Security double dip would put me slightly ahead in retirement, by $220/month. Or if I live 20 years as a retiree (average for men), I can save roughly $50,000 and be in the same place — a $50,000 that’s a lot easier to save with the much higher private salary.
Ah, yes, the “double dip” provision, another way they screw the working class.
When I looked at local government down here, I already decided that if I got the job I would continue paying the Social Security rather than the government pension, because there were already indications that the local Republican politicians were underfunding the pensions and it probably wouldn’t be there when I retired.
Jeb Bush did some serious damage to Florida’s retirement fund by pushing investing with Lehman Brothers. The state fund lost billions on that deal and the underfunding is starting to be noticed as state and local governments get squeezed.