Apr 8, 2007 2 min read

While much attention has been paid to the salaries of state legislators since the infamous 2005 pay raise, citizens should take notice of this fact: More than 3,000 employees of state government and state-supported agencies earn more than $100,000 a year. For a better barometer of this snippet of government excess, Gov. Ed Rendell is 80th on the list, with a salary of $164,396. That means you’re paying 79 others more than the chief executive of the state. In some cases, it’s a lot more. Remember the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency, charged with providing grants and loans to students so they can afford a higher education? It’s top executive makes $289,118.

If you or your child attends a state-owned university, such as California University of Pennsylvania, you may find it interesting to know that the person in charge of that 14-institution system earns $327,718. The presidents of each of those universities also make the six-figure salary list, along with numerous professors.

It’s intolerable given the amount of state aid they receive, but four “state-related” universities – Penn State, Temple, Pittsburgh and Lincoln – don’t have to provide individual salaries because they are exempt from Pennsylvania’s open records law. When you discover from other sources that the Penn State president’s salary is $545,016, you can see why they’d like to keep it that way.

What all of these “public servants” will tell you, by means of salary justification, is that they need to make these high salaries in order to be competitive. They’ll compare themselves to other public agencies or academic institutions, never stopping to think that perhaps the entire bar has been raised too high for taxpayers to shoulder.

And they’ll even compare themselves to comparable positions in the private sector, which is the worst measuring stick available, because the private sector is driven by a profit motive you’ll never see in government. And employees in the private sector aren’t usually the ones getting automatic cost-of-living increases, lucrative early retirement packages and lifetime benefits like health care. Increasingly, those sweet deals exist only in the public sector.

State Sen. John Eichelberger says there are limits as to what government can pay its employees. We agree. And we would add a private sector reality:No one’s irreplaceable.