Good morning Warner. Here I thought that I was the only silly one to be up so early on a Saturday morning.

Great article.

Sneaky bastard, doing this when all the Unions are out in AZ protesting!

How can you have a functioning government if you plan your austerity measures when your employees are A) not working (it was during the week, what do you expect?) and B) not in the state?

Wait a sec! I wonder if this attitude (that work is a distant second to protesting in favor of far leftwing policies) is part of why they have their budget problem in the first place? Could it be that they've allowed liberalism to trump common sense and basic realities?

I am sure you know, Mr. Huston, that California has the 2nd lowest number of state employees per capital at 103 per 10k residents. Illinois has the lowest ratio at 97 per 10k residents. The US state average is 143 per 10k residents.

Here's some more fun stats for you: http://www.nonprofitquarterly.org/index.php?opt…

CA is 2nd for state budget deficit per capita and unemployment. First by a long shot in total state deficit.

They could fire half their state employees and give 50% wage cuts to the remaining half and still be in major trouble.

Not sure how they're going to get out of this as real spending cuts are a foreign concept and they've about maxed out on tax revenue they can collect. Also all their unions have taken the next couple of months off to go protest in AZ, so don't expect much to get done for a while.

Highest taxes and lowest number of employee's according to you, yet can't pay its bills. How come that is fizzle?

Highest taxes? When you buy a house in CA, your property taxes are essentially fixed. Warren Buffet owns a house in Laguna Beach worth millions. His taxes are $2300/yr. If I still owned my house in California, which I bought in 1967 for approximately $27k, the taxes on my house now worth $750k would be about $600/yr.

Right, no explanation for why California is going bankrupt other than an implication that you arent being taxed enough.

Fiza, the main failing of basing your analysis just on per capita numbers is that it presumes a linear relationship underlying the ratio of state employees to raw population exists. There are a number of reasons why that may not be true.

1. The creation of any government division, bureau or agency requires an initial bolus of people be hired which represents a minimum number of people needed to make that division, bureau or agency economically viable. To the degree that such a minimum number is insensitive to the state's population, it negates the presumption of a linear staffing model.

2. The staffing requirements of various government services have differing bases upon which they are predicated. Some services are based more upon geographic area served. Other services are more tied to population density. Yet others are based on raw population numbers.

3. Some services benefit more from economies of scale than others, meaning that for states with higher population densities, the per capita staffing requirements for those services might be expected to be lower than for states in which the population is less densely situated.

Also, rather than to cite an average, wouldn't it be more meaningful to cite the median as your measure of central tendency? Averages can be very deceptive because without some form of weighting they're more sensitive to outliers than is the median. It's for that reason that virtually all home sales reports present the median home value rather than the average home value. Many practitioners in one of my areas of responsibility (employee compensation) rely much more on median wage than average wage.

In summary, wouldn't it be more accurate and meaningful to base your comparisons between states on a statistic which takes into account population density and geographic area, as well as the raw population number? Reporting just the simple ratio of number of state employees to population glosses over a lot of details important to determining the staffing of any state's bureaucracy.

I'm not sure how you read property tax into Mr. EMT's statement since he sure didn't limit his statement to just property taxes. Maybe he was talking about income taxes. Is that a reasonable possibility? And if that was his meaning, aren't California's income tax rates among the highest in the nation? And while we're at it, aren't the combination of state and local sales taxes in many communities in California among the highest in the nation? How about gasoline taxes?

I did not realize the property tax was the only tax in existence.

Of course if any Californians feel they are being taxed too lightly (being subject to *ONLY* property tax and no other tax whatsoever) they could also “share” and donate more of their income to the government.

As good leftists they should understand that it isn't really their money, it's the governments that they have been graciously allowed to posses for a short time. They should also know that government officials better know how to use it than individuals.

Why are so many californians being so selfish with their money (which really belongs to everyone else)?