I'm not even sure about that. This is all anecdotal, but, the going rate for public jobs in my city is still quite low, and this does seem to have an impact on the quality of candidates they receive.

Since they can't attract candidates as effectively (frankly, that nice pension plan isn't nearly enough to make up for the crummy salary relative to what I can earn elsewhere), they aren't getting as many opportunities to hire really ambitious people. This has repercussions that play out in all sorts of ways, but, being a tech guy, the one I am most aware of is that acquaintances complain that the city often relies overmuch on low-tech and highly manual procedures for accomplishing basic tasks, because nobody is really motivated to streamline them. That results in lower per-employee productivity, which, in turn, increases the headcount requirements. Which, I'm guessing, increases overall labor costs relative to what they could be otherwise.

So it's not that the state's salary and pension costs are high because employees are well-compensated, it's actually something of the opposite.

Not true. Public sector salaries in places like Illinois are vastly higher than in other countries. Compare Illinois teacher and police salaries to the U.K. for an eye-opening surprise.

You're saying that when I was a kid, some 30 or 40 years ago, public sector employees were paid better than private sector employees?

I don't know about that, but check out the salaries at my kid's high school:

http://www.oprfhs.org/human-resources/documents/Over75KRepor...

At 50 names a page, you're on the bottom of the third page before you see the first person who isn't taking home six figures in base pay plus cash extra pay, before factoring in benefits.

These teachers are all part of the TRS pension plan and get lifetime pension at retirement. That's the jewel of the benefits package, but the rest of their benefits are pretty fucking excellent, too: cheap health insurance, huge numbers of vacation days.

Say what you will about the importance of teaching (and the fact that these comp numbers are perceived to flow right back into property values), these are not standard deals in the private market. They are, from the day you start your job to the day you retire, superior to the deal most private sector workers get.

> Say what you will about the importance of teaching

Just curious, how does the teaching compare with other schools in other states. I've been saying for a while that teachers should have high salaries like that because for one it matches the rhetoric of "think of the children" / "children first", and that teaching should be a prestigious job in line with engineer, finance, doctor or lawyer. So here is a case were salaries seem to be in the ballpark of being "prestigious" would you say the quality of teaching and the environment in school is correspondingly better?

It's a good school, but it's inferior to the Jesuit college prep high school I went to (except for the facilities, which are far better) where the teachers made much less.

They also get tenure (even in grade school). That sort of job security is worth a lot.

And they get 2 months of summer off.

Those aren't salary, but they are benefits that should be considered.