I have no doubt that California’s public employees are overpaid.  Their combination of salary, retirement, work rules, and health-care benefit is among the best in the world, and a contributor to California’s fiscal crisis.  It is also true that some of the package has been gained by holding essentially holding California citizens hostage.

Still, their methods do not justify unethical behavior by California.  If we have trouble with public employees’ their negotiating methods and pay package, we change the rules and renegotiate their salary.

We have plenty of economic pain in California, and public employees should share that pain, but holding them hostage is not the way to do it.

• One of our current problems is that there are so many spending mandates in California that our policy makers have very limited freedom to respond to the crisis. Further tying their hands makes no sense.
• A spending minimum is realistically also a maximum, particularly in a fiscal crisis. It could easily be good economic policy to not cut higher education in a fiscal crisis, or perhaps make less-than-proportional cuts. If a minimum exists, other constituencies would point out that the minimum had been met, and they would demand that they deserve whatever is left, without a discussion of the merits of the proposed spending.
• The number set is independent of the need, independent of the number of students or the costs of providing the education.
• It arbitrarily restricts future citizens’ choices when we don’t know their preferences or circumstances.

It looks to me as if the proposal was one-off to get the lame-duck governor a cheap applause line in his last State of the State, but it could have real impacts. I worry that California’s government, a government that increasingly exists to serve its employees instead of its citizens, will use this to protect another group of employees, at the citizens’ expense of course.

“Your question is premised on an unproven assertion that implementation of AB 32 would be harmful to the economy when all the evidence points in the opposite direction.”

The editorial goes on to provide other examples of what could politely be called less-than-rational thinking. It also provides some evidence of how completely contradictory to reality the Governor’s office is about environmental regulation. They conclude:

“When you start making stuff up, anything goes. If only the governor’s fantasies didn’t have such dire real-world impacts.”

Too true.