I didn't miss overtime. You wrote "A relative is a lieutenant, make $120k, and overtime brings that up to almost $200k." I only evaluated the base pay.
That was enough to establish that your relative is in an unusual situation to start with. As overtime is a function of the base pay, and most officers are not in a supervisory position, your example doesn't really reflect the typical police officer income.
Pointing to an overtime example from New York (the state with the highest base salary), and a record-setting overtime pay as well, is not useful as an average indication of what a police officer makes. Your position concerned average, non-"hick" officer.
It would be like me pointing to an instant millionaire software developer who won the startup lottery and saying that's typical.
You make good points regarding pension and healthcare. I also didn't include stock options in the software developer income, but none of my options were ever worth the paper they were printed on.
Remember too that your example was for a supervisory position. Most police officers are not in that situation.
I took a different meaning of '"crazy" money". I would have used the term "well-paid" for your definition. "Crazy" implies there's something extreme, no? What term would you use for police officers making $500K/year in base pay?
I think software developers should be unionized, but to start with, I think the programmer exemption for overtime pay should be abolished. Only software developers making less than $27.63/hour or $55,260/year have the possibility of getting overtime, which is about the 10 percentile for software developer income.
That was enough to establish that your relative is in an unusual situation to start with. As overtime is a function of the base pay, and most officers are not in a supervisory position, your example doesn't really reflect the typical police officer income.
Pointing to an overtime example from New York (the state with the highest base salary), and a record-setting overtime pay as well, is not useful as an average indication of what a police officer makes. Your position concerned average, non-"hick" officer.
It would be like me pointing to an instant millionaire software developer who won the startup lottery and saying that's typical.
You make good points regarding pension and healthcare. I also didn't include stock options in the software developer income, but none of my options were ever worth the paper they were printed on.
Remember too that your example was for a supervisory position. Most police officers are not in that situation.
I took a different meaning of '"crazy" money". I would have used the term "well-paid" for your definition. "Crazy" implies there's something extreme, no? What term would you use for police officers making $500K/year in base pay?
I think software developers should be unionized, but to start with, I think the programmer exemption for overtime pay should be abolished. Only software developers making less than $27.63/hour or $55,260/year have the possibility of getting overtime, which is about the 10 percentile for software developer income.