California: Who Gets Paid
- Posted by: Morgan Clendaniel
- on July 2, 2009 at 11:42 am
California, which is leaking money like a leaky bucket, is no longer able to make all the payments it needs to make. Instead, the state is issuing IOUs to some of the people it should be sending checks to, on the assumption that at some point the state will have more money and can pay them back (this assumption, while historically accurate, also seems dangerous). So, who gets the IOUs? Felix Salmon posted the handy chart above.
What we see here is that anyone who really needs money right now—people on temporary assistance, mental health patients, those in drug rehab—they get an IOU. Anyone who, say, works for the UC system or the correctional system—people who might have enough cash in the bank to skip a paycheck or two—get their checks like nothing happened. It can’t be a coincidence that most of the people offered IOUs seem fairly unlikely to have the time or wherewithal to redeem them at the nebulous point in the future when California deems it has enough money to pay them. Nice trick.
The worst part of this chart is the legislators continuing to get paid. Shouldn’t the people who have failed several times to offer a feasible budget be the first people who take a pay cut when they run out of money?
DISCUSSION: 6 Comments
As a UC employee, I can say I definitely don’t fall into the category of “can skip a paycheck or two.” You think we’re lining our homes with gold just because we we work at a university?
People who actually provide a service and contribute to society are getting paid
The idea that anyone would suggest that current California legislators are contributing to society seems ridiculous to me.
an’ those of us who live on pennies a month and now must scrape by on, uh, nothing a month? What’re we s’posed to eat, huh? UC employees gilded shoes?
Doesn”t Gavin Newsom fall into the ‘California legislator’ category, too? Do you think he is contributing nothing to California and deserves to be paid nothing?
No, Gavin Newsom is an employee of the city of San Francisco, not the state of California, and is paid out of the city’s budget.