As I get older, I find myself disliking cops more and more. The vast majority of them go through their whole careers never once firing their gun. Many of them today are the muscle-head jocks of high school who get off on the power over civilians (in virtually every social context) that being a pig allows. And they seem to spend an inordinate amount of time “keeping the highways safe” (i.e., giving out speeding tickets) during morning commute hours of the ever-shrinking percentage of the country that actually works.
The NYT has a piece on the falling dominoes that are CA cities and towns on the verge of bankruptcy due to public sector unions, particularly police unions. (“Police Salaries and Pensions Push California City to Brink”.)
“California cities have had particular trouble with public-safety pensions,” the story notes, “which are among the richest in the nation…” In Desert Hot Springs, for example:
Police officers here, as in many California cities, can retire as young as 50 with 30 years of service and receive 90 percent of their final salary every year — drawing those pensions for decades. Police unions say the fault lies with state and local politicians who failed to adequately fund the pension system over the years, and inflated benefits during boom years. Others wonder whether such salaries and pensions were ever affordable, particularly in cities as small and struggling as this. In Desert Hot Springs, for example, for every dollar that the city pays its police officers, another 36 cents must be sent to Calpers to fund their pensions.
The average pay and benefits package for a police officer here had been worth $177,203 per year, in a city where the median household income was $31,356 in 2011, according to the Census Bureau. All of this had gone largely unnoticed until becoming the center of debate during the recent municipal election.
“Unnoticed”?!
Yeah, maybe within liberal MSM cocktail circuits, but not in conservative circuits.
