Back in Texas, but still thinking about Sacramento

[shelato]

Originally Posted by ryuns

That's true. I do think, however, that 401k's could be greatly improved with a few simple changes: have a good 401k administrator (the one for the State of CA is FANTASTIC, by the way), give a generous 401k match, take money out of their 401k by default and make it difficult to change (conceivably even making it impossible to change below a certain limit), and make default investment age-based, sensible, and reasonably conservative.

I am not saying that your ideas don't have merit, I think they do. But in practice I think a blended system is better. Right now State employees have access to 457 programs for the people who are willing to put away money for their own retirement, but there is a state pension to pick up the people who for whatever reason fail to take advantage of that program, which I suspect is most state employees. But if you look in the private sector at the number of people who haven't put away enough money for their retirement, the numbers are pretty scary.

Originally Posted by ryuns

+1. Well said. I think that at this point, the whole "hero" ideal has led to more problems with police, fire, and teachers' unions playing the sympathy card with elected officials and voters, than it has benefitted taxpayers in attracted talented people to the jobs. Conflicts of interest are so rife among these groups that it's become really difficult to differentiate what actually is, for instance, a public safety concern vs what is a pathway to retain as many fire stations and overtime hours as possible, while the number of actual fires has plummeted over the decades.

That is a good point about the number of fires plummeting, that is fact that is true yet widely undereported. The fire code has worked pretty well. The number of fires has plummeted. Now firemen are mostly just emts for most of their responses.

[ryuns]

Originally Posted by NickB1967

Once upon a time, it was understood that a government job paid less than a comparable private sector job, the compensating trade off being the security of the government job. That doesn't seem to be the case anymore. I know people in the state government doing *much better* than they would otherwise be in private industry, as accountants, programmers, IT, etc.

There is a great passage from humorist and pundit P.J. O'Rourke's book "Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts To Explain The Entire US Government", where he goes to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, expecting to find humorless anti-automobile bureaucrats. To his surprise, he finds gearheads and car tinkerers just like himself, who joined the NHTSA "because they could get better jobs and more responsibility taking mechanical and electronic structures to pieces at NHTSA than they could get by spending 15 years as the third assistant headlight bezel engineer at GM's panel truck division."

O'Rourke goes on: "This was the most disheartening thing I ever heard in Washington. This was much worse than hearing about government malfeasance, incompetence or corruption. When it's better for enthusiastic and ambitious professionals to go to work for a country's government than it is for them to go to work, that country is in trouble. Indian Mughal babus, British Empire civil servants and those at the court of the Emperor Of China all followed this career path...."

In short, no matter how much you hate "the game" of Big Government, don't hate "the players" caught up in it. They are people just like you more often than not.

Though I agree with what you've taken from it, I think the quoted passage is pretty silly. Lots of people choose jobs for a lot of different reasons, and he can't have it both ways, where people are not incompetent, but ALSO somehow not qualified to go work in any other vocations. Whether he likes or not, the government is involved in a lot of extremely technical, difficult work, for which they need talented and qualified people and they need to create an environment that attracts talented people. To put a bunch of engineers who help ensure the safety on millions who travel using this country's infrastructure every day on the level as Indian paper pushers, is pretty insulting, particularly for a professional writer of all things.

[NickB1967]

Originally Posted by ryuns

Though I agree with what you've taken from it, I think the quoted passage is pretty silly. Lots of people choose jobs for a lot of different reasons, and he can't have it both ways, where people are not incompetent, but ALSO somehow not qualified to go work in any other vocations. Whether he likes or not, the government is involved in a lot of extremely technical, difficult work, for which they need talented and qualified people and they need to create an environment that attracts talented people. To put a bunch of engineers who help ensure the safety on millions who travel using this country's infrastructure every day on the level as Indian paper pushers, is pretty insulting, particularly for a professional writer of all things.

But that is the point. The old "civil cervix" rule of less monetary reward in exchange for more security no longer seems to apply. And nations where that happened were nations in decline....