Option title: Greed & Graft at the Public Trough.

I found the above image on a UK blog (click through to read) commenting on the number of UK bureaucrats making more than the Prime Minister. The numbers are all embarrassingly low compared to the $800,000 a year one city manager was making in a poor suburb of Los Angeles. The corruption and outright robbery taking place on the government nickel is simply stunning, especially as the left wing, liberal job creation policy nonsense has so dramatically failed.

The American people are taking notice in this year of the anti-government (anti-political party) wave. Not surprisingly, those with their hands in the public till are starting to get a bit nervous:

On Thursday, city managers from across the state will gather in Sacramento to discuss damage control. Among the ideas on the table: launching an independent examination of city officials’ salaries and compiling a database of salaries for municipal executives.

The Legislature also is mulling several Bell-inspired proposals, including a requirement that cities make salaries easily accessible on websites. Another suggestion would cap pensions of highly paid city officials, an issue that arose after The Times reported that former Bell City Manager Robert Rizzo, who earned nearly $800,000 a year, would receive roughly $600,000 a year in pension benefits once he retired.

Many of the ideas are designed to put political distance between Bell and the rest of California’s 480 cities and towns. “It would be really unfortunate if anyone took the outrageous action of one city and generalized it to all cities,” said Chris McKenzie, executive director of the League of California Cities, which is hosting the meeting.

The stories of soaring salaries come at a difficult time for cities, which are making cutbacks amid a recession that has made many taxpayers ever more interested in what services they get for their tax dollars.

In Sacramento, the Bell salary controversy threatens to undermine the arguments made by city managers against state budget proposals that would take money away from municipalities. For months, city officials have lobbied the Legislature, arguing that they are suffering financially because of the economic slump and cannot afford deeper cuts.

“However, the Times story suggests this duress may not apply to all our cities, or that some cities are not allowing their economic plight to curtail Fortune 500-level salaries for their senior executives,” State Senate President Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) wrote in a pointed letter to the League of Cities last week.

At a time of low public confidence in government, the Bell revelations pose another threat to the credibility of local officials.

These fools in CA don’t even know how much they are shelling out to ‘run government’! They need to spend money to develop a database (watch that take years and millions of dollars).

Of course people are fed up with these elitists who do nothing but push mountains of government mandated paper around. Not only is it ecologically destructive to have people waste resources on the mountains of paper, it is financially insane to pay all these B Ark refugees from Golgafrincham obscene salaries to perform all this useless movement.

This nation is hurting and all we see are incompetent fat cats taking our hard earned money and lining their pockets with our ‘taxes’. It’s time the B Ark crowd got real jobs – outside government. Time to sink or swim with the rest of us.

Tags: 2010 Elections, Bell, Government Graft, Los Angeles