Yankee Institute's Irresponsible "Journalism"

January 21, 2011

Splashed over CT Capitol Report is a headline about the salaries being paid by the Malloy administration to its employees. They link to an article at the conservative Yankee Institute that analyzes the cost of the pension increases for these employees. However that analysis is misleading. It fails to consider the following:

  1. The pension system was in place before the Malloy administration came into power. You cannot blame him for the actions of previous administrations.
  2. The cost of increased pensions must be viewed as an opportunity cost. The legislators were getting pensions anyways. The only way to minimize the pensions under the formula would be to limit the hiring pool to individuals outside state government. Otherwise any person who has served the state for the same number of years would get a similar pension bump . The cost is unavoidable unless the salaries are lowered, or we restrict hires from working in state government after they work in the administration.
  3. Can the salaries be justified? Are they appropriate for the level of responsibility and work given to the employees, and are they in sync with similar positions and responsibilities elsewhere?
  4. Many of these legislators took a risk by leaving safe seats to serve in administration jobs that might not be theirs in four years. It appears the Yankee Institute is happy to grab headlines without considering all angles of the issues it analyzes.

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This work by Matt Zagaja is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.