Want proof that bureaucrats are overpaid? They seldom quit

Paul Krugman, feisty as ever, scoffs at the claim that public-sector employees are overcompensated. True, salaries are 13% higher in the public sector. But, says, Krugman, you’ve got to correct for the fact that public employees are (on average) better educated. After the correction, those public servants earn 4% less than the rest of us.

Well, Krugman is certainly right that you can’t take the raw data at face value. But, at least if you’re trying to be honest, you don’t get to pick and choose what you correct for either. Sure, let’s correct for education levels. Let’s also correct for the fact that public sector employees work fewer hours per week. And for differences in pension plans, and job security, and working conditions.

How can we ever be sure we’ve counted everything important? We can’t, as long as we do it Krugman’s way. So let’s do something sensible instead. Let’s look at quit rates. Quit rates in the public sector are about one third what they are elsewhere. In other words, government employees sure do seem to like holding on to their jobs. More than just about anyone else, in fact. Doesn’t that tell us everything we need to know about who’s overcompensated?

Labor unions, friendly politicians produce rich public pensions

... meet Hugo Tassone, a Yonkers police officer who retired three years ago at age 44 earning a salary of $74,000 a year. Now receiving an annual pension of $101,333, he raised the amount to that sum by working scads of overtime in his last year on the job, it's reported.

That's legal, and he defends himself in a front-page, New York Times story by saying that a cop's work is difficult, that he took on those duties knowing he could retire after 20 years and that inflation will eat into the large amount as he gets older.

Fair enough from his perspective, but hardly fair to taxpayers in a state that now boasts 3,700 retired public employees with annual pensions paying in excess of $100,000, according to the Times. Wait a minute, though. The left coast beats that.

A Wall Street Journal opinion piece of some months back notes that in California, where public pension costs have increased by an amazing 2,000 percent over the past decade, there are some 15,000 retired public employees taking in more than $100,000. Other interesting information relayed in the article by Steven Greenhut of the Pacific Research Institute: Some categories of workers can retire at 50 with 90 percent of the final year's pay on a pension that is inflation-adjusted. And the state's unfunded pension liability was put at $63.5 billion in a 2008 report.

We've talked about the right and left coasts. The middle is not in such good shape, either. According to an investigation by newspapers in Ohio referred to by a Boston Globe columnist, governments in that state are forking out $4.1 billion a year in pensions that have been increasing by $700 million a year. Total unfunded pension liabilities in the country are in the trillions and governments have no way of paying for them without exorbitant tax increases. It's largely the work of the enemy within.

Last year, it was widely noted, public sector unions pulled off a stunner, gathering in more union members than the total in the much larger private sector. More than a third of all public employees are now union members, compared to the private percentage of 7.2. Abetted of course by irresponsible office holders often eager for their political support, these public sector unions have done far more to indulge their members than helping to concoct pensions of a kind hard to locate in private employment.

Read assessments of what's going on, and you discover that the wages and benefits of federal employees in eight out of 10 occupations examined by USA Today are considerably higher than for the same occupations in the private sector.

As vampires drain the treasury voters get riled

Three years ago, the Republican establishment piled scorn on the presidential candidacy of Ron Paul.

Today, he is in a statistical tie with President Obama in 2012 polling. His son, an ophthalmologist who has never run for elective office, is well ahead of not only the GOP's handpicked candidate for Senate in Kentucky but also both Democratic contenders -- all statewide officeholders.

What happened? Did America sudden develop an insatiable appetite for 74-year-old, cranky congressmen from Texas? Is the gold standard catching on?

Paul will not likely be the next president. And his son still faces the most arduous part of his journey as Democrats spend millions to paint him as soft on defense, lax on drug enforcement and too radical on welfare programs.

But there's no doubt that hating the government and the powerful interests that pull Washington's strings has gone from the radical precincts of the Right and Left to the mainstream.

It turns out that watching Goldman Sachs, the United Auto Workers, public employee unions and a raft of other vampires drain the treasury at America's weakest moment in a generation will make a person pretty hacked off.