Troy Senik reports some details of the California state controller’s release of state payroll information:

more than 1,400 state employees took home over $200,000 apiece last year. Some of the more outrageous examples: a surgeon in the state’s beleaguered prison system collected over $775,000 on the year; the chief investment offer at CalPERS (the public pension fund which has nearly $240 billion in unfunded liabilities according to a 2010 Stanford study) pocketed a cool $548,142; and the president of the state’s publicly-funded stem cell research institute pulled down nearly half a million dollars. 

Furthermore, according to the Los Angeles Times, one state prison psychiatrist “received $594,976 for more than 2 1/2 years worth of unused sick time,” and a prison dentist similarly got a “$553,253 payout.”

Something to think about when listening to liberal complaints about the number of state and local jobs lost in the recession. How many teachers could California have kept on if the state was rational in how it paid employees?