Coming Soon: A $1-Million A Year Public Employee
So much for that old saw that government employees are being paid less than the rest of us so they deserve better benefits.
The Los Angeles Times revealed in a front-page story that Bell City Manager Robert Rizzo is paid a salary of nearly $800,000 a year. His contract calls for annual increases of 12%. That means his one-year increase in salary next year will be over $94,000.
If he stays with the job – and why wouldn’t he – and the contract doesn’t change, the city manager of a city with a 37,000 population will be making more than a million dollars a year in a couple of years.
It’s Time to Turn Lemons into Lemonade in Sacramento
Summer reruns used
to be limited to network television. Now, they’ve taken over California
politics. The Legislature’s decision to leave Sacramento without a
budget deal and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s minimum wage declaration
for state employees are both reruns of political battles past. If there
was ever a time for thinking – and acting – differently, it’s now.
With approval ratings at their lowest point in years, many of us hoped
that this year would be different. Certainly, politics as usual is no
longer working. The State still suffers from a chronic budget deficit
and when you add the state pension crisis to the conversation, you have
a scenario that is threatening California’s future even after the
economy improves.
The tax reform commission’s recommendations to reduce
revenue volatility have been shelved without any real evaluation. And
the vast majority of Republican and Democratic lawmakers remain stuck
in their partisan corners, with each side exasperated with the other.
Taxing Our Way Toward Collapse
In California, we spend more money a year on taxes than most spend on food, clothing, and shelter combined. As Californians we also pay some of the highest taxes in the nation, including the highest sales and income taxes. Yet Sacramento Democrats are scheming to take away even more of your hard-earned dollars to compensate for their over-spending despite a staggering $12.5 billion tax increase imposed just last year!
With the highest sales tax and second highest income tax in the country, Democrats are planning again to raise billions of dollars in new taxes. Here are just some of the measures that they have proposed: