From today’s New York Times: “According to the analysis, pension contribution rates for civilian employees in local governments will soar to 30.3 percent by 2015, from 7.4 percent of payroll this year. Contributions to police and fire department retirement plans are expected to increase to 41.1 percent in 2015 from 15.1 percent this year…If there is any silver lining, the trends appear to have somewhat curbed Albany’s appetite for extending pension enhancements to public employees to placate labor unions, which wield enormous clout and lobbying dollars in the capital. ‘I’m alarmed,’ said Assemblyman Peter J. Abbate Jr., a Brooklyn Democrat and the chairman of the Assembly’s Labor Committee, who is one of the capital’s more reliable union allies. ‘Bluntly,’ he said, ‘I’ve spoken to a lot of the union leaders and their lobbyists and said I don’t want to see bills that will cost the counties and the state millions of dollars.’”
Public services are doomed. This discussion doesn’t even include other retiree benefits such as health insurance, or all the debts people like Abbate have foisted on the next generation, future revenues that have been encumbered, costs that have deferred, infrastructure that has not been maintained. This is exactly the combination that produced the 1970s disaster for NYC, but now it will be the 1970s in the whole state. Alarmed? He and his backers, fellow members of Generation Greed, should be celebrating if their goal is to destroy the state. And I don’t want to hear about the “shared sacrifice” of slashing the pay and benefits of future public employees to pay for this, in exchange for having all workers – including those current – do a less good job. I’m not fooled by this. “Bluntly,” in taking and taking and not caring about the resulting harm to others, you any those like have done and are evil. PUT BANKRUPTCY ON THE TABLE.
Here is the link, as I’m having trouble using the link function with a MAC.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/nyregion/08pension.html?ref=nyregion
And by the way, I don’t believe the stock market returns this analysis is based on. Things could very well be worse. Based on record debt as a share of GDP we are facing years of stagnation, and there still has not been enough of a backlash to prevent the executives who sit on each other’s boards (ie. the other predators) from siphoning off what profits there are.