Fields: Elected Officials, Gov. Workers Should Take A Pay Cut
BY SAM FIELDS
Guest Columnist
All across the country companies are facing squeezed budgets.
The solutions are two: lay off workers or reduce salaries.
The simple fact is that government costs are overwhelmingly labor.
It appears that the repeated solution has been to cut programs and lay off workers.
It does not make sense.
Laid off workers immediately go on unemployment. This means the taxpayers, who have now lost the program, are still paying for the ex-workers.
All should share some pain rather than make a few suffer everything.
How about this idea?
- Government salaries between $50,000-$100,000 should be cut 5%.
- Government salaries between $100,000-$150,000 should be cut by 10%.
- Government salaries above $150,000 by 15%.
All elected officials in the legislative and executive branches should take a flat 25% hit.
After all, it’s the electeds that got us in the mess.
BP BANKRUPTCY: NO BIG WHOOP
Defenders of British Petroleum warn that if pushed too hard it will go bankrupt.
They create a doom and gloom scenario of hundreds of thousands workers laid off and billions in assets lost in the wind.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
BP is not a shell game like, for instance, ENRON. BP is a company with solid assets. If forced into bankruptcy, employees would continue to run the company under the watchful eye of a Trustee.
If the company was reorganized, new stock could be sold with the proceeds would go into a fund to pay the creditors–the victims of the oil spill.
Would people who own BP stock, including pension funds, be hurt? Sure.
But that’s why they call it “free enterprise.
Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without Hell.
ALLAH/YAWAH/VISHNU STRIKES AGAIN
Since 2004 the chief attraction at Solid Rock Church in Monroe, Ohio was a six-story statue of Jesus.
I say “was because on June 14th a bolt of lightening of Biblical/Koranic/Talmudic/Vedic proportions –you pick ’em–burned it to a crisp.
In all likelihood this would not have happened if Jesus had a lightening rod.
The lightening rod was invented by Benjamin Franklin. He refused to make money off his invention. He gave it away rather than patent his lifesaving idea.
At the time it was denounced by Christians as interfering with the wrath of god, which is how they saw lightening.
BAD NEWS/GOOD NEWS FOR THE VATICAN
Bad News–It’s another scandal in the Vatican. This one involves Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe and a real estate kickback scheme with Guido Bertolaso, the disaster relief chief for Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi. There is also a hint that hookers are in play.
Good News–The hookers are adults.
June 30th, 2010 at 8:51 am
You are blaming the country’s financial problems on teachers and the brave folks who protect us like fire fighters and cops. The real problem is Wall Street fat cats and lawyers like you.
June 30th, 2010 at 9:18 am
Sam Fields lives in the wrong country.
June 30th, 2010 at 10:51 am
Although there was no notice in the papers or on the blogs, last year Broward County School Board members took a 7% reduction in pay.
June 30th, 2010 at 11:56 am
Sorry “wrong again” but Fields has a point.
Most teachers make less than $50k so they won’t take a hit at all. How many of your cops and fire fighters make more than $100k? More than you know. Cut them to $50k. Congress, The President and the Supreme Court should be cut to $50k. Period. If they want more money, let them work in the private sector, instead.
June 30th, 2010 at 12:18 pm
This is the exact wrong direction instead we should be figuring out how to make everyone better off not worse off. We should seek to eliminate pain not expand it.
June 30th, 2010 at 2:15 pm
I have a better idea! Raise Sam’s taxes to make up for the shortfall. I guess he thought it a good idea when his pocket wasn’t opened up to pay for deficits,
July 1st, 2010 at 4:42 am
A broken clock is right twice a day. And while Sam can’t quite match that record, he has managed to stumble onto a good idea about salary reductions.
July 1st, 2010 at 6:14 am
Instead of reducing the salaries of public servants, why not fix the hourly rates of lawyers at something reasonable like $50 an hour and save everyone a bunch of money. Because most lawyers bill like they work 24 hours a day they can continue to make a living like the rest of us.
July 1st, 2010 at 8:59 am
“All should share some pain rather than make a few suffer everything.”
That is a quote from you Sam. So why would you put that in an article where you are advocating balancing budgets on the backs of public employees? The roll up of the millage rate would cost Broward homeowners less than $100 next year.
Public employees do not exist in the abstract, they are serving the public. When you turn on your tap do you thank the utility plant operator for clean, safe water? When you drive on PUBLIC roads and the traffic lights work do you thank traffic engineering workers?
Come on Sam we are all in this together.
July 2nd, 2010 at 5:49 pm
It’s pensions, not salaries.
July 3rd, 2010 at 9:23 am
He’s not quite there yet. Cut the pay, reduction in force by layoffs and freeze all hiring.
September 25th, 2010 at 3:38 pm
[…] I wrote a piece that laid out a plan for a graduated cut in government worker paychecks above $50,000. It called for […]