The New York Times has an article that describes what the state legislature actually does — hand out money to small groups of influential people at the expense of everyone else, with the cost preferably hidden until the future, without debate, without dissent, and without any facts about the consequences. Measured by dollars allocated, this accounts for most of the legislation over the past 18 years. For most legislators, this and member item handouts is all they do, and all they care about.
Most of the bills proposed would either allow public employees to do less work, or allow them to retire and do no work for longer on more generous terms. Even as the rest of us have faced tax increases from the nation's highest state and local tax burden, and have had our public services cut. Even as $billions are borrowed that will make this even worse in the future. Even as the beneficiaries are out there collecting signatures so the incumbent state legislators can get on the ballot, despite rules and litigation that keep challengers off. This is incredibly unjust, somehow allegedly irrevocable, bi-partisan, and will soon be all that is left of "public service" as it accelerates into an institutional collapse.
Read the article, but if you are too lazy to do so and find out why your public services are collapsing, here are a couple of quotes.
"In what is practically a rite of summer in labor-friendly Albany, there are dozens of bills to 'sweeten' the pensions of public workers. According to an analysis by the Citizens Budget Commission, a business-backed group that favors the restraint of spending, at least 50 such bills are being considered in the Legislature. Some are claimed by sponsors to have no fiscal impact, despite conferring more costly benefits on dozens, hundreds or thousands of people."
Let there be no doubt, if you are private sector worker, who has taken away your retirement benefits and will leave you facing poverty in old age. Public employee unions, and the de facto union of top executives and directors. Were a private company to offer a modest retirement, it would have to charge more or provide less than a competitor. The political and executive classes, which grab their money off the top, would then go elsewhere for a better deal, and you'd be out of a job. You are a serf. They are predators without consciences.
"Critics note that even as lawmakers seek to expand pension benefits for public employees, they are close to approving a controversial bill that would allow financially troubled local governments to borrow from the state’s pension fund to cover payments they owe to the same fund."
“The Legislature just authorized delaying payments to the pension system because they are unaffordable,” said Elizabeth Lynam, the budget commission’s deputy research director. “For them to be making pensions more expensive at the same time is completely irrational.”
The deferrals are only being allowed outside New York City. New York City is already paying far more into the pensions than the rest of the state. And when localities in the rest of the state cannot pay back what they owe, the city will face higher taxes and diminished public services to pay for other people's sweetened pensions in addition to its own. Even as legislators from the rest of the state, representing the public employees who don't live here, pass laws allowing the city's own workers to do less work.
"Pensions are not the only benefit being sweetened. Another bill would require New York City to provide 80 hours of training to firefighters next year to update them on changes to the city’s building and fire codes. Because the city would also have to keep firehouses fully staffed, the bill would effectively guarantee firefighters 80 hours of overtime, at a cost of $18 million, officials said."
You see why it nauseates me to keep reading about the symbolic social "issues" the pols keep yammering out, when this is going on? Will someone please put together a database of every pension sweetener over the past 15 years, not only those passed or signed by the Governor, but also those introduced, sorted by the name of each legislator that co-sponsored or voted for it? Every single one, so they would be better able to take "credit" for it.