Straight Answers on Public Employee Compensation

Stubborn facts, at your service

Do public employees really accept lesser compensation in exchange for job security, as it’s often argued? Do people give up a lot to go into public education just because they love teaching the children? Thanks to the MacIver Institute, the average citizen has a much better chance of finding straight answers to those questions.

The MacIver-operated web site www.WIOpenGov.org has just posted 2011 salary and benefit data for more than 105,000 public school teachers and administrators. With the addition of the current-year numbers, the site now has a continuous, 17-year record of compensation data for every K-12 school district in Wisconsin.

MacIver president Brett Healy announced the newly-posted information said:
11,469 Wisconsin public school employees will take home more than $100,000 in pay and benefits this year.
Overall compensation increased to $6.15 billion this year, compared with $5.97 billion in 2010.
The superintendent of the disastrous Milwaukee Public Schools is the state’s highest-paid school official. Gregory Thornton is receiving $265,000 in salary and another $77,398 in fringe benefits.
Ranking number two, Madison superintendent Dan Nerad—the man who couldn’t bring himself to do anything serious about 84 of his employees falsely claiming illness so they could blow off work to protest at the Capitol—gets a $201,438 salary and $58,034 in fringe benefits.

In addition to K-12 school employees, the web site has salary and benefit information for tens of thousands of state, county and municipal employees. All of the information is public record and lawfully available to anyone, though Healy notes that some municipalities are more forthcoming than others.

Cutting Expenses

The President ordered the cabinet to cut $100 million from the $3.5 trillion federal budget.

I’m so impressed by this sacrifice that I have decided to do the same thing
with my personal budget. I spend about $2000 a month on groceries, household
expenses, medicine, utilities, etc, but it’s time to get out the budget
cutting axe, go through my expenses, and cut back.

I’m going to cut my spending at exactly the same ratio, 1/35,000 of my total
budget. After doing the math, it looks like instead of spending $2000 a
month; I’m going to have to cut that number by six cents. Yes, I’m going to
have to get by with $1999.94, but that’s what sacrifice is all about. I’ll
just have to do without some things, that are, frankly, luxuries.

(Did the president actually think no one would do the math? Please send this
to everyone on your list so people understand what a load of crap this is —as if they didn’t already know)

John Q. Taxpayer