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Ray Haynes

It’s Never Enough

Governor Jerry Brown announced today that the budget was $1.4 billion in deficit. At the end of last year, the state announced that it was giving state employees a raise which would cost taxpayers over $2 billion over the next four years. Do you think there is a connection?

A story ran locally in Southern California saying that over 105 employees in Santa Monica, a medium sized city, earn over $300,000 a year. The Governor of the state of California earns $174,000 per year. If you do the research, you will find that there are over 200 state employees that earn more than that

When I was deciding what I wanted to do in my younger years, my mother told me I should go to work for the government, good benefits she said. I knew I would be bored and would die young if I became a government drone. My little sister listened to her. Today, my little sister is retired on a great government pension, I still fight to pay my taxes. Given the pay that even the lowest government official receives, my mother was right.

Our government pension system is over $500 billion upside down. Retired state employee health benefits add an additional $300 billion or more to that deficit. The system is out of control. Pay and benefits to government employees at state and local levels is incomprehensible, and the government leaders still come to you and I and ask us to foot the bill for their indulgences.

What is even more evil about the system is that government unions, led by thugs who force people to pay union dues for the privilege of having a government job, take the money from the government employees and put it into the political system to pay for the campaigns of the Governor, statewide elected officials, legislators and city councils with whom these unions then negotiate for the out-of-control pay and benefits. If anyone tries to limit them, as I once tried by tying everybody’s salaries to the Governor’s salary, they are marked for political defeat. And the system perpetuates itself, taxes to employees to unions to politicians, as it did in the Soviet Union, until the whole system collapses.

You and I may not pay for this, but our children definitely will. The collapse will come, the only question is when. It always does. When the ruling class (in this case, the government leadership, the employees, and the union leeches), bleeds the people they govern, they kill productivity, which kills the economy, which leads to deficits, which leads to government demands for higher taxes, which bleeds the populace even further, and so on. The government never has enough money. Our only remedy is to cut them off, and force them to accept less.

But we in California aren’t doing that. Our children will rightly call us the indulgent generation. We caused this. Me and the members of my generation. Unfortunately, it won’t get better until it gets much, much worse. There aren’t enough Republicans to stop it, and many of the Republicans that are there don’t seem to have the will to stop the cycle. The Democrats will never have enough money, the government will never have enough money, they will never stop asking for taxes. They will never willingly cut back on their expenditures until they are forced by someone with the political will, or dire circumstances, to cut spending. Sadly, I don’t see the political will. Just be prepared for the collapse.