PAY: Public on wrong track

On your editorial of being accepting of Californians wanting to live in Idaho, I wholeheartedly agree. But what is problematic is the runaway train of public pay as compared to private sector pay.

Now we have many people making six figures as college educators or firefighters in California commuting via Southwest Airlines to work in California from Idaho and the Inland Northwest. And you say, “so what?!”

Couldn’t the fact that a public servant rarely living in the community they serve be a root cause of much social unrest and protests recently?

How is having a public pension unavailable to private sector working taxpayers or avoiding income taxes on a public pension with a sudden disability at retirement just?

Like tales of fish or foreskins, public pay and pensions elsewhere are getting bigger and bigger. Our taxes or public debt go up every year or we lose the public servants we trained or educated to work in more liberal states like Washington, Oregon or California.

The steel rails of public pay with fat pensions and private pay with no pensions are moving further and further apart because the government takes care of their own at our expense. The train of our economy can’t run on the one rail of public pay indefinitely. We can’t carry their weight much longer with our private pay rail further behind us each day. The taxes and public debt are too heavy to sustain this nonsense much longer.

MIKE RENO

Post Falls