Crazy, unsustainable salaries doom San Francisco and other California cities

Consider the city of San Francisco a microcosm of what’s happening in the rest of California. A bankrupt microcosm.

As you’d expect, it’s doomed by its own socialist spending spree, the cost of providing education, medical and jail facilities to illegal aliens, and a bloated bureaucracy.

But the salaries it’s paying city employees are absolutely insane. In 2007, the city had more than 8000 employees who “earned” more than $100,000 per year. Here’s a list of the city’s twenty highest-paid public employees:

$350,324 for a Special Nurse. $325,452 for the General Manager of the Municipal Railway. $270,171 for a Captain in the Fire Department. It’s insane.

How can a nurse make $350,324? In a word, overtime. Here’s how Special Nurse Christian Kitchin’s income broke down:

Regular pay $117,262

Overtime pay $216,277

Other pay $16,785

Total pay $350,324

And don’t forget that this is on top of generous government retirement and health care schemes that aren’t available to the rest of us.

You can see the details of all 8,000 of these government employees’ salaries with the handy list generator at SFGate.com.

Mayor Gavin Newsom, the whiz kid whose managerial genius has bankrupted San Francisco, is now running for Governor of California.

We know how we’ll vote.