The Rudest Question: “How Much Do You Make?”

We ask the typical questions:

“Where are you from?”

“What do you do?”

“How much do you make?”

Oh, wait. We’re not supposed to ask that last question in polite company.

So why are we setting up expectations that citizens deserve to know this kind of information about public employees?

You know what I’m talking about – last week’s story coming out of Bell, CA, where it was discovered that the City Manager of a 38,000-person city in Los Angeles County makes $800,000.

I’m an avid open government advocate who believes in the power of transparency to hold government accountable.

However, I think that knowing what our neighbors earn fundamentally alters the nature of our relationship, especially if we had an expectation in our mind and the reality was far higher than what we deemed to be “fair.”

Yet there are examples of public salary search engines for Federal and state employees.

Does this make you uncomfortable?

Or should taxpayers be privy to such private information because you’re a public employee?

I, for one, don’t think we should be asking such a rude question.

UPDATE: I found this Sunshine Review link to all public employee data. So it’s all hangin’ out there.