State Budgets and Political Influence

The media often gets aroused over Wall Street’s salaries and bonuses. Government salaries get only slight attention.

While we know about Uncle Sam’s spending these days, state and local outlays are also beginning to get commentary because severe budget problems are a tremendous source of problems for all states and cities as well.

I am referring to exorbitant pensions held by millions of active and retired state and local public employees. These include city managers, teachers, cops. garbage collectors, guards and others. They represent at least three quarters of public employees who have what is called defined-benefit retirement plans.

They have the ability, unfortunately, to organize voters and thus control politicians who keep adding to taxpayer burdens until there are not enough taxpayer funds to go around for the feeding frenzy to persist.