How about reasonable wage?

Let's say "competitive total compensation." Because if you don't overcome that threshold, you get hiring and retention issues.

Define reasonable in numbers

Why don't we just make minimum wage $100 an hour?

Because as you've described it, that wage won't scale with inflation. It sounds irresponsibly high now, but wait around and $100 in the future will sound like the $2.13/h + $30+/wk we have today.

The US federal budget deficit for the month of June was $228 billion. Money is being spent and the money printer is running no problem. The administration clearly does not view this as an important issue.

It's tempting to consider "the administration" or "the government" as a single entity that you can reason about like it was an individual.

More likely, there is a bit of focused lobbying being done to suborn the few decisionmakers involved with this, so that a company that contracts firefighting services to the government can grow their contract.

I don't know exactly how it works in California. I know there is a "California Conservation Camp" program that pays inmates $2.90 to $5.12 per day while in the camps, and $1.4 per hour fighting fires, but I don't know if they work with only state prisons or if private prisons get in on that too.

Maybe the cost savings there are enough to drive this dynamic.

People just want simple answers to complex problems, or in this case, purposely obtuse government workings. Not saying we don't have members in congress with good intentions, but they aren't in the positions of weighted power, often times they find themselves snuffed out or forced to fall in line.

The recent railroad strike fiasco was a perfect example of how things are really ran.

The top earners in the US government make a lot: https://www.federalpay.org/employees/top-100

Doesn't seem son hard...

Every one of those top 100 is a medical officer and most I'd guess are doctors, they could all work in private sector healthcare and make a lot more money. I notice that not a SINGLE CTO or technology lead in government made the top 100 list.

The choice of the number 100 is arbitrary. I'm sure we can find some CTO or whatever you want at spot number 587 that makes 387k a year or whatever. Yes, the top 100 are medical officers, but the government has 17,000 employees that made more than 200k last year. They can't all be medical officers...

https://www.govexec.com/pay-benefits/2015/02/17000-federal-e...

No, it is not. The governments in all western countries throw almost unlimited money out of the window for the dumbest stuff imaginable.

Paying the guys keeping the burning parts of your country in check enough, so that they keep doing it seems like it would be up there with "maintaining roads".

it would help if we would reallocate funds from the "kill the middle east brown people" fund to the "pay needed services" fund, like firefighting, replacement of water supply lines to homes, etc.