Dick Pratt, director of the University of Hawai'i-Manoa public administration program, said his sense is the state's financial situation is not as dire as some suggest, but it's hard to tell. The other problem though, is that underfunding civil servants, underfunding teachers, underfunding state employees in the long run will greatly diminish the quality of the workers you have. So, when you have the funding available, you almost have to make those investments or else you risk alienating public employees. Haugen said Washington repealed salary increases that already were approved for public employees during a severe budget crisis in the early 1980s. At the same time the state also laid off some school teachers and cut health benefits.
Numbers can frequently be wrong.
So it's very good to be skeptical about that. Eugenia Toma, director of the Martin School of Public Policy at the University of Kentucky said paying for public worker pay raises is a large issue for many states and all levels of government. If you look at what's going on in Washington D.C. right now, it's quite clear that the federal government pay structure is not competitive with lots of private firms. And yet the public isn't willing to pay more, so there's going to have to be some decisions made about whether this means increasing the amount of services provided in the public sector or the private sector. The Honolulu Advertiser, a division of Gannett Co .