California Budget – the five percent solution

This is from Governor Schwarzenegger’s press release about his proposed budget:

To achieve $1.4 billion in General Fund savings, Governor Schwarzenegger proposed 15 percent reduction in state personnel costs achieved by modifying employee compensation and reducing our workforce budget … as follows:
   *   Employees will be required to contribute an additional five percent towards their retirement costs;
    * An across the board five percent reduction in all salaries;
    * A five percent reduction in the cost of the state workforce payroll implemented by executive order S-01-10 requiring all department directors to reduce their payrolls by five percent.

This sounds a little too incremental for me.  Certainly most State employees can take a five percent hit – they have pretty good jobs, but this isn’t getting to the root of the problem.   What about eliminating Civil Service postions all together?   Put government workers under employment contracts instead – even generous ones.  Then they could stop paying pensions as well, something none of the rest of us get.