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California Can't Perform Pay Cut Because of COBOL
beezzie writes "Last week, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered a pay cut, to minimum wage of $6.55/hr, for 200,000 state workers — because a state budget hadn't been approved yet. The state controller, who has opposed the pay cut on principle and legal grounds, now says the pay cut isn't even feasible because the state's payroll systems are so antiquated. He says it would take six months to go to minimum wage, and nine months more to restore salaries once a budget is passed. The system is based on COBOL, according to the Sacramento Bee, and the state hasn't yet found the funds or resources, in ten years of trying, to upgrade it." The article quotes a consultant on how hard it is to find COBOL programmers; he says you usually have to draw them out of retirement. Problem is, if there were any such folks on the employment rolls in California, Gov. Schwarzenegger fired them all last week, too.
You're forgetting that California has the largest and most entrenched public servant power structure in the nation, nay perhaps the world, excepting France and the former Soviet Union. An interlocking system of unions enjoying sweetheart deals and special protected legal status, dispensed by a legislature beholden to their fundraising and vote-organizing prowess, gerrymandering, the weak coherence of the state in general and its unusually transient population, all lead to this hideous cancerous mockery of government. In this case, the Controller is a partisan elected position, and the Governor has no power to fire him. Practically speaking, the Controllership is a parking spot for future candidates for higher office (like governor) who have lost election to lower office, or are termed out of it, to stay in the public eye, typically by picking fights with the current governor, which of course is exactly what's going on here. Nice that we, the taxpayers of California, get to pay for all this political theater disguised as governing, huh? Blech.
Believe me, we've tried to cut the monster down to size. There's a reason for the periodic citizen revolts, including Prop 13 (property tax reform), term limits (evaded now by a weird revolving flow of public "servants" from local to state level and back), and, most recently, by recalling Gray Davis and installing the Governator, who we foolishly imagined could take a machete to the tumor that is Sacramento and get it off our backs, or at least chastize it into actually doing some useful work in return for the huge amounts of cash it loots from our wallets.
This budget crisis is just the latest round of the perennial budget circus brought about by California's insanely "progressive" tax code, under which the majority of citizens pay zero, and the budget rests on the prosperity of the top 150,000 California earners. When they have a mildly bad year, income-wise, the state's revenues plummet, and when they do a little better, the state's revenues soar. Not surprisingly, California swings wildly between huge surpluses, when they generously endow billion-dollar research institutes and pass out generous pay raises to prison guards and teachers -- the average California teacher earns over $70,000 -- and awful deficits, during which you get, well, this nonsense.
Personally, I'd sign a petitition to simply abolish California's state government, which is utterly beyond hope, and subdivide the state into two (or more) polities, each of which could hold constitutional conventions and try again.
No excuses for this bullshit, none. You should know better. Try going to a poor country sometime and find out what they need instead of theorising on /. Your last paragraph says it all. Your 19th century Marxist pals said the same thing in their day about their countries, and nobody starves in the West today. Jesus, Solzhenitsyn died two days ago, he might as well have never lived to hear shit like that from the mouth of someone who hasn't got a clue about the world he lives in. Get a fucking grip.
[FUCK BETA]
"I'm not saying it's perfect, but normalised against its size, the US is a mild-mannered mouse, a smiling puppy"
Dude you've been drinking to much U.S. government Koolaid. Most of the rest of the world knows the U.S. to be a meddling, bully, invading Iraq wasn't the first time. The U.S. has installed and propped up more dictators than just about any country in existence today, in the name of fighting Communism or defending the interests of its multinational corporations depending on your political viewpoint. In particular the U.S. has been especially fond of making Central America safe for U.S. Banana companies, and places like Iraq and Iran safe for U.S. oil companies. The U.S. under the Monroe doctrine has completely dominated every country in Central and South America since....Monroe.
In Africa the U.S. with the aid of Ethiopia toppled an Islamic government that had the first chance of restoring order there in a long time, and will in all probability let it land back under warlords, just because the U.S. couldn't tolerate an Islamic government running the place. The U.S. doesn't meddle much in Africa because its never cared about Africa as much as the European Imperial powers do, Somalia is just to close to the Persian Gulf where the U.S. does meddle, all the time.
@de_machina