Who was the top paid state employee in California last year? The governor? The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court? How about the leader of the Senate?
Nope. It was a prison psychiatrist who took home an eye popping $838,706, most of it in overtime. I love it! The state drives people insane by sending them to jail, then tries to cure them with triple overtime. It is a wealth destruction mechanism that only a government could come up with.
These are among the revelations uncovered when state controller, John Chang, listed the salaries of all 256,222 state workers on a government website. Only the names were missing. In fact, over 500 state workers earned more than $250,000 a year, vastly more than they could take in with private sector jobs. At least nine made more than $500,000, the top ten taking in $5.8 million.
The data was made public after a huge outcry that followed the disclosure of the salaries of town officials in the small Los Angeles municipality, Bell, which topped $700,000. Those generous paydays resulted in criminal prosecutions. Maybe prosecutors should be casting a wider net?
