{"id":561,"date":"2006-06-10T08:59:00","date_gmt":"2006-06-10T12:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/?p=561"},"modified":"2006-06-10T08:59:00","modified_gmt":"2006-06-10T12:59:00","slug":"the-tics-of-the-polis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/?p=561","title":{"rendered":"The tics of the polis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Not to go all Undercaffeinated on you all, but today I post on a political issue.  I know, I know. <\/p>\n<p>The Buffalo Fiscal Stability Authority has released a press&#8230; um.. release <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bfsa.state.ny.us\/press\/year2006\/20060606.pdf\">stating<\/a> that the city could save all kinds of moolah if we slashed city employee benefits.  They compare the amount they employees pay to some &#8220;average worker&#8221; numbers and that kind of thing.  In summary, they&#8217;re saying that if we worked with the state govt to make the benefits packages less awesome, we&#8217;d save.  They present these packages as disgustingly good and vastly expensive.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the thing. <\/p>\n<p>#1.  Duh.  Benefits, particulary healthcare, have become veddy veddy expensive recently, and employers everywhere are freaking out about it.  So, easy target. <\/p>\n<p>#2: When talking about public employee costs, you should really be making your comparisons based on total compensation, that being salary + bens.  Nice benefits packages are a good way to entice people to work thankless and dangerous service jobs with traditionally low salaries.  The taxpayer doesn&#8217;t want anybody getting rich off his dime, so sal stays lousy.  Bens can increase without anybody getting too wound up about it.<\/p>\n<p>Until now, that is.  Good for the Fiscal whatzit for looking at it, but before we go and slash the bens of people that haven&#8217;t received a raise in years, let&#8217;s make sure we look at the whole story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Not to go all Undercaffeinated on you all, but today I post on a political issue. I know, I know. The Buffalo Fiscal Stability Authority has released a press&#8230; um.. release stating that the city could save all kinds of moolah if we slashed city employee benefits. They compare the amount they employees pay to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/galaxyalex.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}