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Time to rein in government pay
...According to Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute, the total cost of wages and benefits for state and local workers in 2008 was $1.1 trillion, or half of total spending by state and local governments. That number is about to skyrocket. While the private sector lost more than 7.3 million jobs, the number of government jobs increased by about 100,000 since 2007. This comes just as millions of Baby Boomers on government payrolls are beginning to cash in on their mostly underfunded defined-benefit pension plans. The Reason Foundation's Adam Summers notes that in California and elsewhere, government employee benefits have increased by as much as 50 percent in the past decade, "allowing many workers to retire as young as 50 or 55 years old with pensions equal to as much as 90 percent of their final salaries. These are benefits unheard of in the private sector."...