As I mentioned in a previous post a month ago, the GF/GP budget is up some $600 million from the governor's first budget.  Way to cut!  But I don't want to revisit that today, I want to talk about the "lean, but not mean" state government that Granholm claims to have.

Granholm and Democrats with her has made the claim that the governor is asking state employees to sacrifice in order to reduce costs and has even cut down on the state's payroll.  So I decided to take a look for myself looking at documents from the State's Department of the Budget in regard to the Civil Service Department in the state (they have more responsibilities, but put simply Civil Service is the State's HR Department).

So what did I find?  Well first of all, the governor and Democrats are right, there are slightly fewer people working for the state now than there were previously.  In FY 2006 there were 53,012 state employees.  And now, there are approximately 52,359.  So that's a cut of about 653 employees.  So then we are cutting costs right?  Well, not exactly.

The loss in state employees is actually off-set by the amount of money that these employees make.  In other words, we're paying fewer employees higher salaries and because of that the state is paying more money.  Let's check the numbers:

When the state had 53,012 employees, the average annual salary was $48,840 a year.  This runs us to a cost (on average) of $2.59 billion per year to pay the wages for state employees (this doesn't include benefits).

Now, this year, when the state employs 52,539 people, the average annual salary is $51,876.  This runs to a cost (on average) of $2.73 billion (again, not including benefits).

This represents an increase of 5.4% in pay, so if you want to make the argument that this is inflationary, 5.4% is quite a rate of inflation even over a two year period (since DLEG has the Detroit's inflation rate at about 1.7% over the last year: http://www.milmi.org/).

So the next time you hear Democrats or the governor talk about how they've cut the state payroll, remind them that it has actually INCREASED to the tune of $140 million over the past two years!