State gov’t employees perpetually raise their own salaries

California Policy Center’s editor Chris Reed reflects on the many bureaucratic directives (e.g., Proposition 98 and Senate Bill 400) that have increased — or made it easy to increase — state worker salaries and pensions. Rather than funding important projects residents care about, California keeps inflating the salaries of union-protected, pension-promised workers, who aren’t going anywhere regardless. Is self-serving “hero pay” making villains out of government employees? To receive daily updates of new Opp Now stories, click here.

In 1988, with the California economy churning out record revenue, state Democratic lawmakers and their progressive allies had interesting, constructive options. They could fund the water storage projects that experts said a fast-growing state badly needed. They could fix the frayed infrastructure cited in state audits covering dozens of agencies. They could even upgrade the outdated, balky computer system the state used to pay government employees –  incredibly, in the high-tech Golden State, the system relied on COBOL, a creaky, balky 29-year-old programming language that had long since been abandoned by most of the private sector.

Instead, progressives devoted themself to adopting Proposition 98, arguably the most important modern initiative outside of the landmark Proposition 13 in 1978. Prop. 98 was complex but amounted to making a permanent commitment that at least 40 percent of the state’s general fund would fund K-14 programs. If these new funds went to boost teacher pay and benefits rather than capital improvements, well, that was up to local school boards — who were themselves largely run by teachers unions themselves. 

Eleven years later, in 1999, with the California economy again churning out record revenue, state Democratic lawmakers and their progressive allies had interesting, constructive options. They could consider the measures mentioned above. Or they could figure out a way to use the windfall to boost government employee compensation. The Legislature famously chose the latter, enacting SB 400, which provided a shocking retroactive 50 percent pension boost to most state workers.

In 2013, with the California economy bouncing back from the Great Recession, Gov. Jerry Brown and Democratic lawmakers said it was time to use state revenue gains to help the 6 million students who were English-language learners, who lived in impoverished households or were foster students. They enacted the Local Control Funding Formula, which changed state school funding rules to ensure that districts with high percentages of struggling students got a big influx of money.

This article originally appeared in the California Policy Center. Read the whole thing here.

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Image by Marco Verch