Posted by Tina
If there wasn’t enough evidence to prove progressive methods for managing tax revenues are grossly corrupt and unworkable this story might just do the trick:
Oct. 26 (Bloomberg) — Jean Keller earned $269,810 last year working as a nurse at a men’s prison on California’s central coast by tripling her regular pay with overtime hours.
Keller got more overtime in 2010 than any other state employee. In all, California’s public workers collected $1.7 billion of extra pay last year, more than half of it in overtime, state payroll data show. The rest was for unused vacation and union-negotiated benefits such as clothing allowances, physical-fitness incentives and special compensation in recognition of a “complex work load.”
The kicker is the long trail of liberal policies and blunders that led to this happy outcome for Nurse Keller. Back when Jerry Brown was governor the first time he approved collective bargaining rights that allowed government union workers to negotiate these ridiculous compensation perks. Fast forward to a government that is hostile to business, sending them screaming from the state, high unemployment and is deeply in the red and unable on occassion to meet its obligations without a bailout from the countries taxpayers. Recently California has been in a bind, financially speaking, and was forced to lay off 30,000 teachers…don’t you love that word “forced”, as if they couldn’t have guessed where all the greedy “union demands” and anti-business posturing would lead:
Union-negotiated “pay differentials,” requirements that workers take monthly furloughs and staff cuts that heaped extra work onto remaining employees combined to inflate overtime and other non-salaried pay, the data show. So did inefficiencies in management of state departments, said Dan Pellissier, a deputy cabinet secretary under former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
This is a long, eye-popping article…California is in deep, deep trouble. Untangling the mess could be more painful than letting it crash. Progressive policies won’t fix it either. What is needed is pro-business policies and a lot of strict discipline. We need industry, jobs and people working in the private sector to create a large revenue stream and we need our government workers to remember it is the taxpayer who foots the bill for their pay and perks…a little less greed and a lot more respect please! There are a number of other changes that would dramatically reduce the size of government and the need for debt and tax increases but these changes would be a good start to getting us back to the golden state we once could proudly claim to be.
Thanks to Pie for alerting me to this story.
Progressive management, my butt.
Under actually progressive management, the state would have hired another nurse, thereby employing two people rather than one, and probably saving us taxpayers $69K.
And none of this results from public employee union dealings. It results from that a judge said California prison inmates must receive medical care, which you’d think it would not have been necessary for a judge to say, but ….
Libby: “Progressive management, my butt. ** Under actually progressive management, the state would have hired another nurse…”
Apparently you forget that progressives have been in largely control of the state for some time now and apparently you failed to actually read the policies (liberal/progressive) that brought this particular outcome:
“It results from that a judge said California prison inmates must receive medical care…”
That is probably a contributing factor…from a liberal judge who decided that those citizens who failed to meet the responsibilities of good citizenship deserve very expensive five star medical care instead of the no frills basics our military, for instance receives.
Libbya,
Substantive reBUTTal?
😀