Sunday, January 23, 2011

$144,000 Garbage Collectors . . .

From World Net Daily: Life's tough for $144,000 garbage collectors. New York benefits emblematic of national government crisis.
Taxpayers in the Big Apple are forced to pay $144,000 a year for salary, health and pension benefits for garbage workers, who are unskilled but unionized laborers.

Research by the Manhattan Institute, a think tank in New York, shows that when Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office after 9/11 the city increased spending on garbage workers' salaries by three and a half times the rate of inflation every year, growing the sanitation department budget from $1.3 billion a year to $2.2 billion.

Don't tell me that there isn't a problem with government sector spending.

1 comment:

RPP said...

The basic problem illustrated by the statements is the built in payroll and benefits annual increses, every year for a period of time, no matter what. This is the problem of all government union contracts. They are not adjustable, they increase whether or not revenue does. This results in built in, ever growing debt bombs that we are now experiencing on all levels of government. Private enterprise has the capacity to get lean during hard times. There is no such capacity in government for its largest expense, that of labor. Until the taxpayers and their representatives come to grips with this condition, costs and taxes will continue to grow.