The Interocitor

Things you won't read in the Times

The Los Angeles Times wants to be a national newspaper, mentioned in the same breath as the New York Times and Washington Post. While it obviously has a ways to go, one of the casualties of its national focus is its coverage of local issues. For that you really have to turn to the Los Angeles Daily News.

While the Times has run stories about how hard it is for the new Governor to rein in spending, it is left to the Daily News to explain why California spending is so out of control. Today's Daily News feature story lays out the salary explosion in California's state, county and local agency budgets. The short story is that salaries have increased, over the last 5 years, twice as fast as the rate of inflation, and almost twice as fast as per-capita income:

From the city of Los Angeles to California state government, the cost of salaries and benefits for public employees has soared far faster than inflation in the last five years -- three times as fast in the case of the Los Angeles Unified School District, a Daily News analysis has found.

The study showed that spending for public employees' salaries and benefits at the state and local levels increased overall at more than twice the rate of inflation and grew faster than the per capita income of average Californians. The cost of pensions was excluded from the analysis because of the wide disparity between different levels of government.

The spending binge started at a time that tax revenues were soaring, at the peak of the 1990s dot-com boom. Now that the boom has gone bust and the economy remains weak, state and local officials are making deep cuts in public services and looking for ways to raise fees and taxes. The review covered the fiscal years from 1997-98 to 2002-03.

"At all levels of government, the rate of compensation has gone up much more rapidly than it has in the private sector and, most importantly, faster than the personal income of the people who pay for this," said Steven B. Frates, a senior fellow at the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna College.

"There has been a wealth transfer. It has gone from the citizens to the people in government.

"You often hear people in government cry that there are going to be cuts and we're hurting the poor and the little children. The fact of the matter is the citizens of the state, county and city are making life better, not necessarily for schoolchildren or people in need, but for government employees."

Yet, when the crunch happens, it is The Children™ that are trotted out as the objects to be sacrificed if there is any cutback in the bloated budgets. Never once do you hear that a bureaucrat's job will be lost -- it's always the librarians and teachers that have to go, aid to the blind to be axed, 90-year olds having their walkers reposessed, and kindergartners having to eat cookies without milk.

But the sad truth is that salaries, benefits and pensions are eating an increasing share of budgets, and without reductions in salaries or staffing, there's little hope for maintaining services. So when Granny gets tossed into the snow, don't believe for a minute it's the taxpayer's fault.

Posted by Kevin Murphy at March 14, 2004 01:19 PM | TrackBack