Texas pays public employees $12 billion annually, with 78,000 making more than $100,000 per year

The Golden Horseshoe is a weekly designation from Just the News intended to highlight egregious examples of wasteful taxpayer spending by the government. The award is named for the horseshoe-shaped toilet seats for military airplanes that cost the Pentagon a whopping $640 each back in the 1980s.

This week, our award is going to the state of Texas for doling out $12 billion of taxpayers' money to its public employees annually. In 2019, just over 78,000 state and local government employees each earned a yearly salary topping $100,000. About 24% of those employees outearned the state's governor, Greg Abbott, whose salary was $153,750.

According to OpentheBooks.com, some of the generously compensated individuals on the public payroll include: several speechwriters for college and university presidents, who made $140,000; presidents of community colleges, who earned more than half a million dollars; and library directors, who brought home in excess of $200,000.

The border city of Laredo paid their city manager $880,000 in salary last year. Texas, in fact, is home to some of the best-compensated city managers in the United States, with some earning more than $500,000 annually. The salaries have increased so much in some cities that voters have grown noticeably irked. In San Antonio, for example, voters approved a referendum in 2019 imposing a salary cap and term-limit on city managers. In 2018, the San Antonio city manager earned $574,594. To put that in context, no four-star general in the United States military makes more than $300,000 annually.

The San Antonio library director took home a salary ($202,875) higher than any federal employee at the National Archives and Smithsonian Institutions.

In 2019, 8,975 public school employees made above $100,000 per year, including about 1,000 of whom made more than Gov. Abbott's $153,000. Six superintendents earned more than $400,000. In total, the salaries of public school employees cost the state's taxpayers $1.1 billion last year.

The Texas state government employs a similar number of employees whose salaries exceed $100,000, and the Texas public college and university system employs nearly 17,000 people making more than $100,000 a year. Some of the highest earners on the public payroll in Texas are the head football coaches at state universities.

Texas A&M — a school with an endowment of more than $13 billion, which nonetheless received $80 million in coronavirus bailout money — paid its head coach, Jimbo Fisher, $5.15 million in 2019, Tom Herman of the University of Texas earned $4.72 million, and the University of Houston's Dana Holgorsen was paid a $3.7 million salary.

Current estimates put Texas' government debt at just shy of $100 billion, or $12,000 per state  taxpayer.