Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane…no it’s Super Bureaucrat!
Actually, look to New Jersey, because you’re going to see a taxpayer ripoff that will get your blood boiling. Depending on your perspective, this may be worse than the toll collector on the New Jersey Turnpike who pocketed more than $300,000 in a single year.
Because today’s super bureaucrat isn’t getting overpaid for one job. He’s getting overpaid for six jobs!
Here are some excerpts from a local news report in New Jersey (h/t: Reason).
Patrick DeBlasio was hired Wednesday as Highlands’ chief financial officer — his sixth concurrent public job and ranking him among the highest-paid public employees in New Jersey. Highlands will pay DeBlasio a $40,000 annual salary on a part-time basis… DeBlasio will not have to work a minimum number of hours, said Administrator Tim Hill, or be required to go into the office.
Maybe one day I can get one of these $40,000 no-show jobs that don’t require any work. But I don’t know if I could juggle several of them, and this is what makes DeBlasio special.
DeBlasio has a full-time job as Carteret’s CFO and part-time gigs in Keansburg, North Plainfield and the Carteret School District, the report said. He is also currently Highland’s tax collector.
It’s rather convenient that he also serves as a tax collector since it takes a lot of money to finance all his government salaries.
In 2012, DeBlasio’s annual compensation totaled $244,606, more than Gov. Chris Christie or state Treasurer Andrew P. Sidamon-Eristoff, who earn $175,000 and $141,000, respectively.
As the old saying goes, nice work if you can get it.
Maybe it’s time to start a Bureaucrat Hall of Fame, sort of like our Moocher Hall of Fame. In addition to Mr. DeBlasio (and the toll collector mentioned above), charter members could include the following.
- A transit bureaucrat from California who got $330,000 without doing a day of work.
- Cops in Oakland getting average compensation of $188,000.
- A school superintendent in New York raking in more than $500 thousand of annual compensation.
- A California government official raking in $822,000 of taxpayer-financed loot in just one year.
- A Philadelphia bureaucrat, after working only 2-1/2 years, nailing down a guaranteed pension of $50,000 per year.
- A New York school bureaucrat simultaneously getting a $225,000 salary and $300,000 pension.
- California taxpayers being forced to pay a fired bureaucrat $550,000 for unused vacation time.
When you read these stories, it’s easy to understand why so many states are in fiscal trouble.
And it also makes sense that state and local bureaucrats are far less likely to quit their jobs than folks in the productive sector of the economy. After all, how many people leave positions when they’re being overpaid?
But don’t forget that federal bureaucrats enjoy an even bigger pay advantage over private sector workers. Indeed, my Cato colleague Chris Edwards reports that they get twice as much average compensation as the serfs in the productive sector of the economy who pay their bills.
This video has the unhappy details.
