OK, so the United Nations may be an outfit rigged by bloc votes of despotic governments, steeped in anti-Semitism, freighted with projects for ruling the planet, and accountable to no one, including its sugar-daddies in Washington. But when it comes to the top-level international public servants who keep the place humming, at least they work cheap. Right?
Wrong. Fox News’s executive editor, George Russell, has a must-read piece out on the salaries of senior UN officials. Some of them enjoy significantly higher take-home pay than members of the U.S. Cabinet, in which the Secretary of State makes $199,700 per year, before taxes.
At the UN, reports Russell, an under secretary general working in New York, with one dependent, ends up taking home about $234,000, tax-free. The base salary is listed as $145,854, but the UN then adds a “post adjustment,” to compensate for cost of living. For an assistant secretary general in New York, with one dependent, the post adjustment transforms the $133,776 salary into $215,781. Again, all exempt from taxes. And there are a lot of these senior official types at the UN, though the UN itself does not share any organized list of such details with the public. Russell got hold of confidential UN personnel records and discovered that the UN at the end of last year was employing 489 top-ranking executives: “That is slightly more than the number of equivalent positions – 484 — on the top-ranking payroll schedule of the U.S. government’s executive branch.”
With deep-in-debt America being by far the largest donor to the UN, financially strapped American taxpayers might find it interesting to peruse the salary tables and post adjustment charts linked in Russell’s article. If the UN can’t be drastically reformed, and the administration insists on bankrolling its budgets to the full, then your average American taxpayer has really only two choices — keep paying for this stuff, or go get a job there.
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