Do you ever wonder where your tax dollars go? Well, if you live in California you won’t be too happy reading a report by the Center For Government Analysis for the Howard Jarvis Association looked at the spending of California counties on its county employees. If you’ve seen the track record of county pols on debacles like King/Drew, then you probably won’t be surprised.

Amongst the findings:

• Total payroll expenditures for county government in California increased from approximately $12.1 billion in 1997 to over $17.9 billion in 2002, an increase of almost 48%.

• Per capita county payroll expenditure for each man, woman and child in California rose over 37% in this five year period, while the total statewide aggregate number of county employees per thousand citizens increased a little less than 7%.

• Statewide, payroll expenditures for welfare system employees increased over 72% between 1997 and 2002.

• The number of welfare recipients in California decreased by over 55% between 1997 and 2002, while the total number of welfare system employees increased 36% and the payroll expenditures for those welfare system employees (as noted in Item 3 above) increased 72%.

• In Los Angeles County, between 1997 and 2002 the number of CalWorks welfare recipients declined 40% while the payroll expenditures for welfare system employees increased 66%.

It seems that the place to be for the past 10 years was as a county employee in California. Especially if you could get one of those plumb welfare jobs. There are not many businesses where your “customer” base could decline by 40% but you still get an increase of 66% of payrolled employees.

Once again, tax payers are getting fleeced. Maybe it’d be a good idea that before taxes are raised yet again, we see just a little of the waste, inefficiency and corruption addressed first.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 12th, 2005 at 4:09 pm by Insider and is filed under California Schemin', Brilliant, but uncategorizable, Your Tax Dollars In Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.