Taxpayers vs. Bureaucrats, Part XXVIII

You might think I would be past the point of being surprised about excessive pay for bureaucrats, especially after narrating the new video for the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, but even I'm shocked by this New York Times story about bloated pay for bureaucrats at New York City's Metropolitan Transportation Authority. More than 8,000 of them pull in six-figure compensation packages, and 50 of them get more than $200,000. By the way, don't snicker and think this is just a problem for NYC taxpayers. Thanks to federal subsidies, folks all across America are paying for this taxpayer ripoff.

In an era of generous municipal salaries and union-friendly overtime rules, it may not come as a complete shock that there are thousands of Metropolitan Transportation Authority employees — 8,074, to be precise — who made $100,000 or more last year. The usual top-level managers are included in that list, but so are dozens of lower-level employees, including conductors, police officers and engineers, many of whom pulled in six figures in overtime and retirement benefits alone. One of those workers, a Long Island Rail Road conductor who retired in April, made $239,148, about $4,000 more than the authority’s chief financial officer, according to payroll data released on Wednesday. ...more than a quarter of the Long Island Rail Road’s 7,000 employees earned more than $100,000 last year, including the conductor, Thomas J. Redmond, and two locomotive engineers — who were among the top 25 earners in the entire transportation authority. ...Two car repairmen at the L.I.R.R. and 12 police officers assigned to the authority’s bridges and tunnels, some of whom earned more than double their base salaries, were among the 50 employees at the authority who collected $200,000 or more, the data show. ...Around 60 percent of the authority’s current budget — about $7 billion — is used to pay labor costs including payroll, pensions, and overtime.