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Comment by mgleason_3 | Hacker News Reader

In California many/most public employees earn over 6-figures in total compensation. This includes government employees, teachers, police, Fire, etc.

Yea, it’s insane.

Don’t believe me? Look it up - https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2017

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That source has obvious serious data quality issues, which are dramatically evident if you filter by “University System”; the three highest paid entries with that filter, which are the same person [0], three times with the same job title and slightly different total comp figures. The same person appears twice more on the first page, too, with significantly different pay (but the same title, etc.)

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_L._Mora

If you want good people, you need to compensate them, and you need to compensate them relative to the high cost of living in California. Otherwise, the good people will stay in the private sector and government jobs will be filled by people who couldn't succeed in the private sector.

That's happening to some extent already, but there are a lot of people who would do very well in the private sector who choose public service. For society's sake, we don't want that to be such a big sacrifice that nobody smart would do it.

So compensate them by paying them more now instead of taking the easy way out through pensions and bad math.

I'm all in favor of that, but good luck raising taxes enough to make that possible.

So it's either raise taxes now or raise taxes later.

Police and fire fighters are doing very hazardous work. Teachers tend to have postgraduate degrees. All can be living in high cost-of-living areas where $100k doesn't go as far as people think.

"Government employees" could be running departments or administering budgets that would be director-level positions in a private corporation.

But, yeah, it seems like too much to pay $600k per year for checking that applicants correctly filled in the phone number on their 124-J forms. But I'm not sure it's always that clear cut.

I posted this earlier, but police work statistically isn't that dangerous.

There are about 421,000 police officers in the US.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/191694/number-of-law-enf...

If you look past Fox News sensationalist headlines, they said 146 were killed in the line of duty last year. http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/06/11/americas-police-of...

Those numbers might seem low to you, but that easily puts police officer in the top 25 most dangerous jobs according to this source:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/careers/2018/01/09/work...

From the article:

The most common cause of death on the job were intentional shootings, which claimed the lives of 46 officers last year. Almost as many officers died in car accidents.

Only 46 actually died from intentional shootings.

So some officers are murdered and others die from traffic accidents. I'm not sure why that makes the job less dangerous.

How is a police officer getting killed in a car accident any different than anyone else getting killed on the roads?

Police spend more time driving than the average person, due to the nature of the job. Writing tickets on the side of the road is also hazardous. The job increases their risk of dying in a car accident.

It's not. But local governments don't hire a lot of deep sea fishermen, so they don't get hazard pay that affects local budgets.

Pointing to teachers’ education levels is highly misleading. Teachers overwhelmingly have post-secondary have degrees that have little value in the market (often even negative value). That’s not a reason to pay them more.

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