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What Percent of California’s State Budget is Employee Compensation? - unionwatch.org
An influential liberal blogger in Orange County, Chris Prevatt, made the following claim on January 25, 2011 in his post “Busting The Myths About Public Employee Pension Costs,” “For California’s budget, salaries represent 7.5 percent of the total state budget. The costs for healthcare and pension benefits are another 3.7 percent.” If only this were true.
...When you add this all up, personnel costs for California’s state government are not somewhere barely above 10% of their total expenditures, as Prevatt asserts, but, doing the math, $41.9 (direct employees) + $18.1 (K-12 employees) = $59.96 / $89.6 = 67%. That is, using data taken directly from the state’s payroll records, combined with overhead calculations courtesy of an exhaustive study commissioned by an (arguably) sympathetic academic institute, along with very reasonable assumptions regarding transfer payments – not even considering transfer payments to localities for line items other than K-12 education – taxpayers are seeing at least 2/3rds of California’s state budget used to pay employee compensation.
They got so much flak on this one they went back and did a more thorough analysis - it's even worse -
84%
Editor’s Note: Given the sensitive nature of the conclusions herein, and based on informed criticism from many who commented and emailed in response to this post, a 2nd, more in-depth analysis was posted on this topic on Feb. 11th, entitled “What Percent of California’s State AND Local Budgets Are Employee Compensation.” In that more thorough analysis, state worker compensation as a percentage of state government revenues (not passed through to local governments and agencies) was actually found to be higher, 84%, than in this analysis, 67%.
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What Percent of California’s State AND Local Budgets are Employee Compensation?
