California Money Down the Drain?
Who was the top paid state employee in California last year? The governor? The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court? How about the leader of the Senate?
Nope. It was a prison psychiatrist who took home an eye popping $838,706, most of it in overtime. I love it! The state drives people insane by sending them to jail, then tries to cure them with triple overtime. It is a wealth destruction mechanism that only a government could come up with.
These are among the revelations uncovered when state controller, John Chang, listed the salaries of all 256,222 state workers on a government website. Only the names were missing. In fact, over 500 state workers earned more than $250,000 a year, vastly more than they could take in with private sector jobs. At least nine made more than $500,000, the top ten taking in $5.8 million.
The data was made public after a huge outcry that followed the disclosure of the salaries of town officials in the small Los Angeles municipality, Bell, which topped $700,000. Those generous paydays resulted in criminal prosecutions. Maybe prosecutors should be casting a wider net?
