Via Steven Greenhut via Lou Minatti:
Taxpayers in Illinois are looking at close to a $900 million salary and pension liability for the top 100 school administrators in their state. That’s not a typo.
New York? The same situation. New York residents are paying for some sweet pensions.
(James Hunderfund) receives $316,245 annually since retiring as superintendent of the Commack school district on Long Island two years ago. He soon returned to the school administration business first as an interim superintendent and now as permanent superintendent of the Malverne school district. His pay is $1,000 a day.
One retiree, former Roslyn school district superintendent Frank A. Tassone Jr., receives his annual $173,495 pension in prison after being convicted of stealing $2.2 million from the school district.
Now I know what the “public good” means. It means screwing the public good. That was only a couple of years ago, I am sure things are much better now. In case anyone doesn’t get the title reference, here is one of my favorite movies of all time.
Perhaps all these anti-capitalist folks should have thought before they voted in a regime that would kill the companies in which their pension funds were invested.
Moreover, many of these public pension funds were heavily invested in real estate, on the recommendation of gunslinger hotshots and business school professors who had models, good models.
[…] Public-Sector pensions gone wild. […]
Economics is a funny thing. We have heavy statistics and mathematic model because people express choices with money, which is usually measurable to two decimal places. Yet, money is typically Number 5 on frequent surveys of employee job satisfaction. Inc magazine finds the same results among entrepreneurs: they might make less than in an equivalent salaried job, but they enjoy their work more.
The consequence for public education or government in general is that according to theory, we get the best workers by offering them the most money. If the market is always right, then those school officials are worth $9 million a year in retirement promises. Not offering it would bring us less qualified administrators of those important public institutions. At least, that is one way to look at it.
The thing is with entrepreneurship that there are no guarantees: heck, you might get rich. Even the best paid government bureaucrats are capped at less than the market equivalent. Of course, you might go broke – as we all know – which threat a unionized civil servant does not face.
The problem then becomes how to organize work so that everyone – even a salaried line accountant in a private firm – is paid like an entrepreneur who must satisfy a shifting array of individual “bosses” to be successful.