Today’s LA Daily News:

City worker costs up 7.5% a year, but revenue up just 5.7%

Salaries, pensions and benefits for Los Angeles city workers have soared in the past seven years, outstripping revenue growth and pushing the city toward a serious budget crisis, according to a Daily News study.Since 2000, Los Angeles workers’ costs have surged 53 percent - to $4 billion a year - rising an average 7.5 percent every year.

General fund revenues also grew strongly but only at an average 5.7 percent a year.

The result is a swing of almost $1 billion, pushing the city from a surplus to an anticipated shortfall of $300 million next year.

“It’s almost like we’re working for them; they aren’t there to serve us. The situation has gotten badly out of whack,” said Jack Kyser, chief economist for the nonprofit Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.

Why the large gap between employee costs and revenue growth? It’s the power of city employee unions to get politicians elected to office, said Alice Rivlin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office and now a senior fellow at Brookings Institution, a highly respected think tank based in Washington, D.C.

The education unions have gotten their stooges elected to the school board, and the LAUSD is such a model of accomplisment and efficiency, right?

Let’s go all the way and turn over healthcare to these people.