Your tax dollars at work

The Indianapolis Star has compiled a nifty database of Indiana employee salaries, so we're now able to look up how much our favorite bureaucrat or lawmaker gets. It's no great surprise that the highest-paid public employee in this basketball-crazy state is Tom Crean, the IU coach. He gets a base salary of $600,000, but built-in contract extras guarantee him $2.36 million a year -- that makes it nearly $400,000 per victory this season so far! It's also not too startling that Gov. Daniels, with a paltry $95,000 a year, is way down on the list.

But this is very interesting:

Of the 22 highest-paid state government employees who don't work in academia, 20 of them are psychiatrists or psychiatric medical directors. They all make between $150,000 and $243,586 a year ...

I don't know what all those shrinks do, but just a casual look around tells me we're obviously not getting our money's worth.