The one thing I would do if I could magically put it into place is for there to be a nationwide recognition that no government employee and no professional whose income is primarily paid by the government has a right to an income that’s greater than the community that he or she purports to serve can afford to pay. IMO one of the logical consequences of this is that they should live in the communities they plan to serve.
I’d limit those incomes to three standard deviations above the median income but that’s just my own rule-of-thumb.
In Chicago the median income is about $38,000.
But Dave, but Dave……….then you won’t get the best and brightest! Oh, wait……….and your next post is about Joe Biden.
Although increasing pay may attract some of the “best and brightest” at the margins, what it overwhelmingly does is pay the same mediocrities at a higher rate. The next strategy along that path is to divide the payscale into tiers in which you pay more for degrees. That’s why so many people in government have bogus (easy or even outright fraudulent) degrees. They can’t all get into the Ivies but they can all get mail order doctorates.
Dave you radical, you’d be guillotined within a fortnight if you actually got traction with this wonderful idea. Not only politicians would be out to destroy you, but the big business and union interests pulling their strings.
It may be radical but it’s also mathematics. That’s the reason state and local governments are running into financial problems. It’s the same problem as with the healthcare system: too many people making too much money.
Would this apply to federal employees? The communities they serve are often much larger than the local community where they actually work.
The community that federal employees serve is the United States.
When you are paying people in these jobs 1/3 of what they would make for an equivalent position in the private sector, how will that work? Wouldnt it make more sense to limit pay by comparison to what is earned in the private sector?
Steve
It may have missed your attention but there are no jobs waiting in the private sector for them to take.
I’m also wondering how you arrive at the conclusion that there are “equivalent positions” in the private sector. There is no such thing as an established market value for most of the jobs in government. The wages are established by fiat.
It may have missed your attention but there are no jobs waiting in the private sector for them to take.
It seems to have escaped the attention of most of your commenters.
If you decentralize the federal presence in DC, it might work. DC incomes are stratospheric, mostly due to the presence of those agencies. The bulk of the agencies could move out of DC, into the hinterlands where they’re clientele are and leave only a much smaller HQ staff in Washington.
It isn’t the federal government that’s my greatest concern but state and local governments. How, exactly, is Chicago to afford hordes of public employees earning well into six figure salaries? The typical Chicago firefighter earns more then $100K. The city can’t impose an income tax, the sales tax is already driving retail out of the city, and there are limits to how high and fast the city can increase property taxes. Right now the city is depending on increasing fees and excise taxes for revenue growth.
Next year the city is facing a billion dollar revenue shortfall for public pensions. There’s no obvious source for the additional revenue that’s needed.
Local conflict about the inadequacy of pay for the city attorneys. A firefighter’s starting salary is $46k. The average salary of all city attorneys is $55k. One is unionized the other is not. I am moving towards the position that government employees should not be allowed to unionize.
Are municipalities typically paying substantially more than three standard deviations above median? That’s the 99.7th percentile, no?
I don’t know what’s typical. I do know that Chicago is paying a number of employees upwards of $300K a year and that Cook County is paying an even greater number upwards of $500K per year. There’s something wrong with this picture.
Maybe I should move my line down to two standard deviations.
Additionally, it should be clear that I’m talking about wage income.
PD:
I don’t know what the rules are in Springfield but here in Chicago after a short probationary period firefighters (and policemen) move up the payscale very rapidly. And then there’s the availability of overtime.
Wow, $100k is a lot. I didn’t realize it was like that.