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The debate over skyrocketing government-worker salaries got nasty in El Segundo when a homeowner published the six-figure salaries flowing to the small town's cops and firefighters on his Gundo Blogger website — only to have a police captain track him down by phone at his UCLA job and chew him out.
Last edited by Frank DeForrest; 10-21-2010 at 08:06 PM..
The elite in all organizations across the board in this country have been paid way out of proportion to their achievements these last two decades. Sports, entertainment, government, corporations, education, charities, etc - the salaries and benefits of the top people in all these groups have skyrocketed while the salaries of average working to middle class people stagnate or decline.
Why does it cost $12 for a movie ticket?
Why are hard cover books $42?
Why are tickets to sporting events $85?
Why has the cost of a college education been several times the inflation rate?
Why are state and local governments broke?
Why have salaries been stagnate (even before the recession)?
Someone has to pay for these outrageous and bloated salaries and benefits.
While these salaries are certainly high, there are several big problems here.
First, he's taking the total amount of what the job costs and tries to make it sound like that's what they are being paid. Sorry dude, no dice. Either compare salary to salary or total cost to total cost.
Secondly, why no mention of cost of living? El Segundo is one of the most expensive places to live in the United States. The police captain's salary of $225,000 is over twice as high as a comparable salary would be in Omaha, a city of over 400,000 people. A police captain earning $99k in Omaha would not be out of line with the market rate, so neither is El Segundo's.
The biggest laugher, is this...
Quote:
El Segundo is a 1950s-style suburban gem with row upon row of Craftsman bungalows tucked between noisy LAX to the north and tony Manhattan Beach to the south. The nonresidential half of town is heavy on tech, industry and military. Municipal challenges are few; city government jobs are not hard. There's no clear reason for anyone to earn anything but small-town government incomes.
Sorry, morons. El Segundo isn't a small town. It's a small, extremely wealthy city with a very high cost of living. Due to the high cost of living you can't expect the cops and firefighters there to live any kind of decent life without paying them adequate salaries.
I don't know why this twit thinks he should be able to live in a white collar city and pay blue collar wages to his city workers, but that's just not going to happen.
El Segundo is a small city that just happens to be located on the ocean and in between LAX and Manhattan Beach. El Segundo also has the added benefit of having Raytheon, Northrop and Chevron, The Aerospace Corp and a lot of other corporations located in the city which gives them a lot of revenue.
The city itself is far from being posh. Most of the properties do not have a view of the ocean from El Segundo. And the city smells like a sewer half the time because of the Hyperion Waste Treatment Plant which takes up most of the city's ocean front. And then you also have the noise from the airport.
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