Unsustainable

Mac-

“Quit sit te nothi.” All the brilliantly well educated bureaucrats justifying their unsustainable gravy train here overlook one plain and simple fact: private industry does not force anyone to pay money to them. Government DOES force EVERYBODY to sacrifice their discretionary income to support the ivory tower.
The only thing weaker than their logic is the backbone of these overcompensated, competition-phobic socialists.

Ironic how little compassion and understanding these supposedly “tolerant” and “compassionate” authorities have for the ones who feather their nests. Are they really both as brilliant as they claim yet as clueless as they appear? Will these public servants ever serve any of the public other than themselves and their own families?

Whenever I see reports from reform groups I like to know where the funding for the group comes from. Do you know where For the Good of Illinois receives money from?

A retired teacher from Danville wrote on Adam’s blog, about how administrators, teachers, and school districts vary widely in their compensation. It is by Marjorie Jordan:

http://forthegoodofillinois.org/blog/2011/09/illinois-billionaire-bureaucrat-club-q-a/

She is right that the public perception of the top dogs then gives the false impression that all teachers, etc. make outrageous salaries. And, I totally believe her when she wrote that she believes she worked harder than the superintendents, without the salary and the perks.

If we don’t stop giving away our industrial base, our State and our country won’t be able to provide vital services for our citizens. We have lost 58,000 American factories since 2000. The war on labor started by Reagan and has reduced many in our middle class to the working poor. Dekalb county has low wage workers on Medicaid. Mac why don’t you include what the top private sector administrators and CEO’s are paid? Please include the salaries of the administrators at Kishwaukee Health System.

NIU is the number one employer in DeKalb County. It is a government agency, supported by tax dollars. Oh yeah, sure, there’s tuition and fees, etc., paid by parents/students, but a good part of those monies come from federal or state tax coffers by way of Pell/MAP grants and other tax supported educational programs. Then there’s the fact that NIU pays no property tax on a substantial amount of land and facility, which leaves a larger burden to the rest of us in the county, city, township, state, etc. For anyone to try and pretend any state university is somehow funded largely without tax dollars is ludicrous. The only government agency I can think of that might make this claim is the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which charges application fees to fund its operation (only to have some of those funds stolen by Congress for other purposes). But NIU…it is tax supported.

But to the point…Mac is correct. Regardless of the list’s absolute accuracy, profs working summers for “free”, etc., such a large number of highly paid government jobs and pensions in this county (and state) is unsustainable. The whole government complex is obese and must be downsized by choice now or we’ll all be downsized by disaster soon enough. Gubernatorial candidate Bill Brady understood this and promoted a 10% across the board cut for starters.

In DeKalb County, we have NIU as #1employer, Kish Health Systems as #2, and School District #428 as the third. All three are tax supported by one means or another to a large degree. Thank goodness there are some actual private manufacturers and other business concerns in the county that really do produce goods and services not related to or dependent on government support or purchasing. But they are too few and too small. We need many more.

I think Mac or Adam should publish alongside the Profs, Admins, Board Members, Elected and Appointed Municipal and School Officials…a paycheck list of the secretaries, janitors, groundsworkers, extra help, dayworkers, etc. at NIU and our other tax supported institutions. If the entire citizenry saw the contrast of those two salary lists side by side, there would be hoots and howls till the cows come home. And, I suspect, a few new lawmakers and agency heads after the next election. Maybe that’s exactly what “For the Good of Illinois” is hoping for? About time!

is salary the same as total compensation? i dont think it is but I dont have a PhD.

Mac,
i challenge you to go to the Chronicle of Higher Education and print the comparable figures for other universities. First the data you are presenting is distorted. Secondly, NIU in comparison to its peer group of public Ph.D. granting universities is at the extreme low end of compensation. Secondly, public universities as a whole pay considerably less than to privates. Get that data and print it, I dare you.

Second, printing top salaries and then pretending they are more general is at best disingenous and at worst i don’t what.

yes, typical employee at NIU especially at the highly trained and educated level earns more than does a less educated person. But by focusing on the top you are simply, distorting and doing so with intent.

Take a free enterprise private fortune 500 firm and then go down and list the salaries of the top 100 employees. Those figures would bother people and make them wonder why they are paying so much for whatever it is the firm produces. But if you went down and looked at average salaries of the typical worker a totally different picture would be present.

Selecting only top salaries (and then distorting them) from the private sector is a horrible, unfair, manipulative way of looking at the public sector. But what does one expect from those whose politics are shaped by alienation rather than a concern for the common good.

herb

I checked the spread sheet from the state – it is correct and the writer of the article is still wrong. You are still as wrong as they are if you reprint with no due diligence. The problem with reprinting these articles is that often these people fudge the facts for some purpose other than the truth.
Mike Haji-Sheikh.

Mac,
Your list of salaries are in error. The person who put the list together figured the salaries on 12 month. The faculty are paid 9 month and most of us work for free in the summer to support our Grad students. You have me at $110k and I make $83K. This salary level is below what I made as a top engineer for a multinational. I checked other salaries in your list and many if not most were wrong. Your numbers for admins are correct for admins are paid 12 months. I would like an apology from you and a retraction otherwise we will be writing letters pointing out in detail the errors that you have made on the subject in both the Northern Star and the Chronicle.

Dr. Michael Haji-Sheikh

Some justified and some completely out of whack for what these people are giving taxpayers. Definitely interesting especially when you hear some of these people on this list complaining about their pay.

What is truly amazing to me is what the NIU President gets paid., $418,000.00 annually and he also has use of the NIU’s President’s living quarters and staff. Transportation and many other perks.

Here is what the President of the United States gets annually (now I know there are some additional perks but let’s think about the job duties also when we compare salaries):

The president earns a $400,000 annual salary, along with a $50,000 annual expense account, a $100,000 non-taxable travel account and $19,000 for entertainment.The most recent raise in salary was approved by Congress and President Bill Clinton in 1999 and went into effect in 2001.