From the Assembly press release on Tier V: "Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Governmental Employees Committee Chair Peter J. Abbate today announced the passage of legislation they sponsored (Extraordinary Session Bill A.26) that would enact a new and cost efficient tier of pension benefits for public employees which could save the state and local governments $48.5 billion over the next 30 years."
For more than a decade, this generation of state legislators have awarded one pension enhancement after another to their generation of public employees throughout New York State. These enhancements were granted retroactively, and not worked for or earned. And now, to ensure they in fact get to be paid for decades for doing nothing to benefit anyone else, they have taken back SOME of those pension enhancements for SOME of the FUTURE public employees, while their geneation has given back NOTHING. They say this will save $48.5 billion, which is the amount that will be transferred from future public employees unless they somehow reduce the quality of the work they do by that amount. If taking away SOME of the enhancements will save $48.5 billion, how come Silver, Abbate and the rest claimed that GRANTING those enhancements to begin with would cost ZERO? We have not yet begun to pay that zero.
And why won’t anyone talk about this?
You can bet that as taxes soar and services collapse, there will be a concerted effort to shift the blame. Black people? Immigrants? Anyone stupid enough to start a business in this state? Anyone but those who have benefitted. The New York State Legislature is full of the worst members of Generation Greed.