California has an admittedly strange law that is supposed to take effect when state lawmakers fail to pass a budget by a certain deadline. In the absence of a budget, the law is designed to automatically reduce the pay of all state employees to minimum wage. Then, once a budget is passed, back pay is provided and the usual pay scales kick in.
But when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently tried to enforce the law, the state controller, John Chiang, refused. He said it could not be done because California’s computer software had not been updated to allow the state to cut government workers’ pay.
That’s a curious argument, to say the least. As Reason magazine pointed out, “Even sympathetic [technology] experts dispute this claim, noting that the system has been easily tweaked to handle nearly 50 separate pay raises as well as multiple automatic deductions for mortgage car payments, union dues, and tax withholding.”
So in other words, California’s computers can readily be adjusted to accommodate dozens upon dozens of raises for government employees, as well as various tax breaks and the like.
But it is only when there is a suggestion of reducing government workers’ pay that the state’s computers suddenly “seize up” and cannot function properly.
Isn’t technology wonderful?