Most of the top salaries on that website don’t have overtime on their totals, but if you go down a bit, it starts to show up. You want to see overtime, be a Bus Operator. Some of those guys hauled in forty to fifty grand just in overtime.

I don’t have an unhealthy interest in your county–all this information came up some time back when I was trying to find numbers on spending in your area to answer some comment or other (long forgotten). Figuring out where the money actually goes in government is a bitch and a half. I’m no accountant.

Other “Valley engineers” might be raking it in. I’m a self-employed contractor, my specialty isn’t in a lot of demand right now around here, and I can’t move. If I were 18 again, and the private space industry where it is now, I would have made many different decisions. I never wanted to try and start the damn industry up myself.

I’m not complaining, I feel my state pension was fair, I had 20 years in the system (that counts other state employment I had, plus converted military time I bought back, etc. But my Florida Retirement System would not have matched my salary unless I had spent almost 40 years in the system. Of course, my salary was much lower than for comparable work in the private sector. I started out at Charlotte County at 40% of what I was earning in Mountain View when I got layed off. And when I finally retired, I was earning the same I was 20 years earlier in California, and that is NOT correcting for inflation, either.

And of course, when they hired me, I was told with a straight face, “Our compensation is lower than the private sector, but we have an excellent retirement package.” The much-touted “job security” evaporated, along with our County Administrator, which is why I’m not working right now.

The grass is always greener, etc, etc. I calculated once that if I had not been laid off in 1990 from TRW, I would have been able to retire 9 years earlier. So much for those “higly paid municipal employees”. Those 6-figure salaries are only for suits, and you Silly Valley engineers.

God knows these people deserve great pay, but the demographics and future liabilities are killing us. And yes, it’s different for different places. Which is probably why New York is going into the crapper faster than Florida.

Salaries and benefits for public employees are a matter of public record, so I don’t doubt the figures. I also don’t doubt that the examples given were from the upper end of the list.

Heck, yours used to be on an internet site along with everyone else’s in your neck of the woods. If you’re just scraping by, you might have been in the wrong line of work. I had to page through almost 300 names before I got to a position that paid less than $100,000, and that didn’t count benefits or pensions. My own county has over 3,000 people in that category. Your County Administrator clocked in at Number One with over $300,000 a year.

Maybe teachers in NYC retire on 100k$ a year, but I’ve yet to meet one here. Its like those 70K$ Detroit assembly line workers. I’ve never met one of them either.

It’s always the other guy, ain’t it? Never anyone you know.

Well, TB, just who is trying to make us “pissed”? Is it the conservatives, who got us into those wars? The Bush administration who ran the economy into the ground, destroyed housing, forced trillion dollar bailouts? Are they trying to get us “pissed”?

I’m curious, what’s your take on that? Is it the liberals who are trying to get the unemployed, the foreclosed, the disenfranchised “pissed”. Do liberals have some clever plan to irritate those in desperate circumstances?

May be. I’d just to like to know your take on your statement.

Thanks.

Jesus did not show up at the doorsteps of the rich with an armed Roman soldier on each side of him, demanding more cash for Caesar so that the Empire could care for the poor.

A new project for you: Go find out which groups do the most voluntary giving in this society.

Some Zones are apparently safer than others.

Right-wingers and Fundamental Christians are so afraid of anyone having something they don’t it’s embarrassing. And punitive.

Read the New Testament, which contains the New Covenant, and the teachings of Jesus, and rethink that post.

If my anchor drags I’m on the rocks, but I can see there’s already a lot of bleached bones there waiting to greet me.