We often wonder when we’ll reach the tipping point where there aren’t enough private sector workers to finance the salaries and benefits of government employees.
Public employees and the town, city, and county managers who oversee them seem to take it for granted, more and more, that they are entitled to certain benefits that, in fact, most private sector workers don’t get anymore, if they ever did.
We’ve noticed that all the proposed local government budgets contain so-called cost-of-living raises for their workers – 3.5 percent in Elon, 3 percent in Mebane and Burlington, and 2 percent in Gibsonville, Haw River, and proposed for Alamance County in the county manager’s budget.
Must be nice.
Taken for granted is the fact that taxpayers will also be expected to pay for most of the higher medical premiums (this year, typically 6 percent) for most local government employees.
In the private sector, it might be assumed that if the employer had to pay extra to finance such medical benefits for his company’s employees, those employees might be expected to forgo a salary bump.
But not in government.
They get both – and more. Higher premiums on their behalf for medical benefits, dental, and even vision (in some jurisdictions), plus higher rates paid for long-term retirement benefits – another benefit long gone for most private sector employees, who’ve come to rely primarily on Social Security, rather than any sort of company retirement plan.
Back to the cost of living. We notice that none of the local budgets proposed any sort of cost-of-living adjustment for taxpayers, i.e., a reduction, in the tax rate for taxpayers. Taxpayers are apparently expected to just quietly and dutifully absorb the higher cost of living for which government workers get a raise (at taxpayer expense, of course).
One of the best features of the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, from which taxpayers are still benefitting 45 years later, for instance, was the adoption of an amendment by Sen. Bill Armstrong (R-Colorado), which provided that in addition to the tax cuts included in that Reagan-era tax reform bill, the new rates would be indexed annual for inflation.
So rather than having taxpayers pushed into higher and higher tax brackets by periodic raises, some of which they might have received to compensate for inflation, those federal income tax brackets are adjusted each year to reflect inflation.
It seems to us that state legislators in Raleigh need to look into requiring that same principle be applied, locally, to property tax rates.
If the cost-of-living adjustment for city workers in Mebane or Burlington, for instance, is proposed at 3 percent, it seems to us the property tax rate should be required to be reduced by a corresponding 3 percent. (That’s at least before any other tax rate changes are proposed, higher or lower, for the relevant tax rate.)
Somehow, someone somewhere needs to be considering the impact of government taxation on hardworking, private sector employees, most of whom do not get the same relatively high salaries, health insurance coverage, paid holidays and vacations, or generous retirement benefits enjoyed by most government employees.
Individual council members or commissioners could make the effort, but it seems to us “cost-of-living” considerations should apply to both taxpayers and government workers, not just the latter.
