The 'failing' New York Times (NYT) earlier this week published a whopper of a story in "Public Servants Are Losing Their Foothold in the Middle Class".  The unstated goal of the article is apparently to garner more popular support for the teacher strikes taking place in multiple states, public service unions in general, and suggest that public servants of all stripes are just not getting paid enough, nor are they getting good benefits.  

This seems to defy perceptions, especially around these parts of Ludington where getting a full-time public service job comes with a plethora of competitive benefits and salaries that often eclipse the private sector.  City of Ludington workers get a benefits package of around 80% of their salary and their generous wages seem to get raised even when revenues remain steady.  

When one actually reads the NYT article the stats that are thrown out at the reader seem to only deal with job growth in the public sector, not the wage factor which would be symptomatic of losing their foothold in the middle class.  You have a lot of public servants complaining about their lot in life, which might be a little more meaningful if they were in downtown Manhattan, rather than rural Oklahoma:

Justin Fortney, 41, who lives with his wife and son in Guthrie, 30 miles north of the capital, was forced to start job hunting. “We always made it work,” said Mr. Fortney, who was employed by the state for 12 years and earned about $50,000 annually. “But if you’re going to choose to be a public servant, you have to have in mind that you will live in a small home and drive a sometimes unreliable vehicle.”  [The median household income in Guthrie, OK is just over $30,000]

“I was surprised to realize along the way I was no longer middle class,” said Teresa Moore, who has spent 30 years investigating complaints of abused or neglected children, veterans and seniors in Oklahoma. She raised two daughters in Alex, a rural dot southwest of the capital, on her salary...  At 57, Ms. Moore now earns just over $43,000, which she supplements with a part-time job as a computer technician.  [The median family income in Alex OK is just over $31,000.  The median female income in Alex is $21,563]

And not to be outdone:

“My adjusted gross income is $28,000,” said Shala Marshall, a Spanish teacher at Jenks High School. A 17-year veteran with a master’s degree and a finalist for Oklahoma teacher of the year, Ms. Marshall has two children. “I can’t support a family on that,” she said.

The NYT obviously didn't want to do minimal fact checking on her 'adjusted' salary, whatever that is, which is likely less than a third of her actual salary.  The average salary for a teacher at Jenks is over $72,000, one with her experience is likely a ways above that.  And while Jenks offers higher wages in general than the other smaller cities, the median wage for females is $28,419.  Ergo, she is being paid three times more than half of the women in Jenks.

Government employees in this country — at the local, state and federal level, as well as school and state university employees — have not suffered economically this century, they have actually prospered.  

Nationwide, government worker compensation jumped from $71,634 in 2000 to $123,214 in 2017, a 72 percent increase. Those national figures are stated in 2017 dollars. Total compensation includes not only salaries, but also the cost of fringe benefits.

Michigan, government workers had an average total compensation of $65,596 in 2000 (when stated in 2017 dollars after adjusting for inflation). That rose to $105,017 in 2017, a 60 percent increase.  The data comes from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The pattern is not sustainable as the public sector is greatly dependent on the success of the private sector for the taxes, fines and fees it relies on.  Rather than having the fibbing New York Times create a non-existent crisis that is actually the reverse of the real crisis of unchecked public sector wage growth, let's have them look instead at the crisis of the insane tax burden that New Yorkers face.

For as the NYT headline says: "Public Servants Are Losing Their Foothold in the Middle Class".  Tis true, but that's only because they are increasingly joining the upper class.

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Not to mention the free police protections when your corruption comes to light. Priceless!

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