Some thoughts I've had for some time, re pensions and overcompensation of civil servants in general. I think I've been open about my own participation in CalPers. But the concern here is for cops, schoolteachers, court clerks, and the like. Which concern can be expressed in two questions.
Who's going to do these jobs? And what are we going to pay them?
You can't draw either from the bottom of the barrel. Even a lowly patrol officer is going to run into situations where he has to have and exercise considerable human judgment. They have to know a fair amount of basic Constitutional law, substantive criminal law, all sorts of field forensic techniques, and so on. More than that, you want some sophisticated capability in the system – detectives who can cope with sophisticated white collar financial and political crimes. You don't want to have the trade secret that a half-dozen people have staked their lives on, stolen, and no better dectective, than the type who rolls his eyes and says, looks like a civil matter to me.
A good teacher, say, English, has to know something about the English literary tradition – Shakespeare, the English literary tradition, and so on. (My daughter's junior English history teacher at St. Francis taught Shakespearian authorship controversy as if it was an actual controversy. Dear God.)
No one who gets into these vocations does so to get rich. But they don't want to become poor, either. They want the same potential for upward mobility as anyone else. Speaking of Santa Clara County, which I know, and cops, whom I know, preserving the mobility became more and more difficult in the 1980's and 1990's. Cops either had hand-me-down homes from long time residency, or wives making better money in high tech, had a second job, or lived out of county. One of my best high tech detectives drove in from Sacramento every morning. Another commuted from Modesto. Second jobs? A few were realtors, which I guess is OK, but a couple of the better ones opened their own PI agency – while remaining on the force – which is clearly NOT good.
Which brings us to pensions. What happened locally, with CalPers overfunded and willing to help, was that the County and local municipalities increased pension benefits, rather than address the cost-of-living issue head on. They thought they were saving money, and they were probably right.
So I will ask again – who's going to do these jobs? Veteran CEBers may recall a while ago I noted the paradox, that although there is all kind of complaint about levels of compensation, nobody on the Board wanted to do them (or their children to do them, in the particular case.) Pomona grads don't do them. The only Stanford grad I know who became a policeman is Randy Fasani, who – despite his brilliant and misused athletic gifts, is not whom I'd think of as a computer cop. I know a few more in secondary education, but very few, and not recent grads.
To me, the whole issue of pension compensation is a subset of the much larger problem of income distribution. It was not so long ago that someone could become a civil servant and buy a house and send their gifted child to Stanford. Not any more. To come completely out of cover, I do believe that what's happened is demographics, particularly Baby Boom demographics. I think sometime during the 50's, we began to enshrine the professions as sinecures for the college grads. Thus we overcompensate the professions outrageously, also executive salaries, and undercompensate others.
Governments built up pensions locally because there is no way they could afford to pay their civil servants enough, not to become rich, but to maintain a place in the community. Not good for a number of reasons. Los Altos Hills and East Palo Alto don't have that much in common, but it is desirable that they be policed by residents of their own communities. They aren't, for different reasons,
In any case, any one who takes issue with any of this, please address the question. If you do believe these persons are overcompensated, do you want the job? For yourself or your children? If not, why not? What sort of cops and teachers do we want, and what are we going to pay them?
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