As some readers might recall, I wrote a series of posts based on a model of how much the pensions initially promised to New York’s public employees should have cost, how much they were underfunded based on excessive investment return assumptions, and how much some of the major pension enhancements (among the dozens) of the past 15 years and pension spiking have added to the cost. I found that most of New York’s public employees were promised pensions that, properly funded, would have cost 11.8% of their pay, with 8.8% paid by taxpayers and 3.0% by the employees themselves. For those in physically demanding jobs, the total cost would have been 16.2% of pay, with 13.2% paid by taxpayers; for police and fire it was 29.6% almost all paid by taxpayers. Subsequent deals and pension spiking have (just deals I’m aware of) more than doubled the expected taxpayer cost of pensions for teachers and those benefit from the “traditional pension incentives” repeatedly offered, while also drastically increasing the cost for workers in other categories.

Let’s say, however, that you are not a person who is in a position to live decades without contributing any thing to anyone else, and force other people who are worse off to pay for it, the way the public employee unions and politicians have? What does the model say about your retirement, assuming retirement for you will mean what it has generally meant historically – a few years of leisure at the end of a long working life? To answer that question, I have added a “reasonable” retirement scenario to the model, and find that you had better be saving 10.0% of your salary or more, assuming you are paying for your entire retirement yourself (or almost all of it).

That's what he said, but it isn't true. He had no trouble saying no when he wanted to, unlike his members who are required to say yes. What he said yes to is what he has done. Silver's supporters have been given taken the highest state and local tax burden as a share of personal income in the U.S., and have provided less in return, mostly by diverting resources to those who do not work. Yes the Republicans and their contractor and Wall Street backers got their piece and their tax breaks too. And to keep the serfs from objecting, most of the cost was pushed off to a future none of them cared about to be inhabited by people none of them care about either.  We will pay more and more, and get less and less, as the beneficiaries die or leave for Florida with the difference.

Pataki and Bruno are gone, Thank God, but their damage lives on. Silver's still increases.  There were no dictators.  Silver and his backers got their piece of our hides.