Thursday, January 15, 2009

Money and the State of California: Consider Nero

Okay, somebody with accounting skill, I have an assignment for you:

1) Please research the salaries of executives and administrators employed by the state of California.

2) Determine the number of salaries over $100,000 a year (do not include benefits, only taxable gross pay).

3) Determine the number of salaries over $250,000 a year (following the same criteria as in item 2 above).

4) Hypothetically "take" $10,000 a year from the employees in item 2 and $20,000 a year from the employees in item 3.

5) Add up the dollar amounts from the "take". Multiply by 3 (as in "we could institute these cuts over a three year period.")

6) Acquire the number amount of the budget deficit faced by the state of California.

7) Compare the sum of the "take" with the deficit.

8) If the sum of the "take" is greater than the deficit, open a savings account for the state, change the hypothetical "take" to a real one, and sock the surplus money away for a rainy day.

9) If the sum of the "take" is less than the deficit, slash $30,000 a year from salaries above $250,000 a year and keep cutting by five-thousands toward $100,000 until the problem is solved.

10) Restructure state spending policies so that expense budgets do not depend on the previous year's spending; state departments should not be forced to spend money unnecessarily just so they can receive the same amount of funding in the following year.

Cutting state services, education and health care should never be considered as options. If Rome is burning, first: take away Nero's fiddle. Next: fight the fire with the biggest hoses.

2 comments:

Elizabeth said...

I'm no accountant. However, a cursory look at state employee salary (excluding UC and CSU employees) shows that there are 14 state workers that are paid over 250,000 per year. Now, if we slashed their pay by 20,000 for three years, that would come out to a total of 840,000. Now, when you apply the same principal for for employees making over 100,000, you the total comes to 59,580,000. However, this is only for the top 1,986 earners. There are prob hundrends of addtional employees making over 100,000 and this is also excluding the 1,000s of administrators in the CSU and UC systems.

I'm still looking for my bailout.

Anonymous said...

Yes, please also consider administrators in CSU and UC systems.