Thanks to lavish medical and retirement
benefits that kick in at a young age (often permitting a second career,
resulting in two paychecks), a vast economic gulf is opening up between average
taxpayers and average government employees. America is slipping into a
nation with a governing class enjoying a far better life than those they
govern.
Michigan Capitol
Confidential has done a very useful calculation that I would like to
see performed for every state. James M. Hohman writes:
The average state employee now costs taxpayers $117,000 per
year, according to data from the state Department of Civil Service. This
includes both salaries and benefits.
Note
that the average household income in Michigan (which includes
multiple earners in some families) was $48,273
in 2013. But when it comes to what is now a laughably obsolete term,
“civil servants,” those average household taxpayers are paying more and getting
less:
The total cost of benefits has exploded, even though there are
fewer state employees. Annual retirement costs increased from
$431.8 million in 2001 to $1.6 billion in 2015. (snip)
The rise in employment costs has occurred even though the number
of administrators, corrections officers, conservation officers and others on
the state payroll has fallen drastically over the past 15 years.
The state hasn’t cut back on its functions much, but the number
of people performing those functions fell from 62,057 full-time equivalent
workers in 2001 to 46,588 FTEs in 2015. Despite the smaller
workforce, their annual cost has increased from $3.9 billion to $5.4 billion.
The growing average costs of employment have spread the
government workforce thin while also requiring more cash. As a former House
Appropriations Chair Chuck Moss once quipped, “At this rate, eventually the
entire budget will go to employ just one person.”
The
growth in total compensation cost for what should now be called “civil masters”
instead of “servants” is nearly accounted for by health care, retirement, and
other benefits.
In
the new class structure of America, the majority of the population lives with
uncertainty and anxiety over health care and funding retirement, while the
class of masters can spend everything they earn, instead of scrimping and
saving like the common folk, free from worry over the ability to pay for
medical care, or living out the senior years in dire poverty.