[quote=eyePod]I for one don’t want to pay higher taxes to continue to pay state workers pensions. That’s just crazy. Also, my point was not “I don’t get a pension so neither should they” (which I didn’t say) although that is a nice way to create a strawman and demonize me. Are you totally out of touch with economics? The private sector discontinued pensions because they could NOT fund them and stay in business. Guess why California is broke? Wake up and smell the coffee.[/quote]
Here is your quote:
[quote=eyePod]I’m calling bullshit. For me, my SS represents about 20% of my income at retirement AND I PAID IN A HELL OF A LOT MORE by any rational measure (fact). Why should a calif. employee get 50% – 80% of his income for life (fact), retiring in his 50s (fact)? That’s just a screwed up state government, not anything to be proud of, not anything I want at all in my state. I get NO pension. Why should the people I pay (with taxes) get ANY pension. They should get 401k and SS just like everybody else.[/quote]
It seems pretty clear to me that your argument revolves around the “I don’t get it, so why should they” argument. Not only that, but you don’t pay more than they do, and your taxes do NOT directly pay for their benefits. Here are the facts:
“As a result of diversified strategies made possible from pooled contributions, today CalPERS pays three-quarters of retiree benefits from investment earnings.”
The pension contributions (which represent the remaining ~25% of the revenue sources) are split between the employers and the employees, as part of their compensation. When you hear about the “penion obligations” from the anti-union propagandists, they are talking about total liabilities, without consideration for revenue sources; this is NOT what the taxpayers have to pay. They are trying to fool the idiots who get their “facts” from Fox News into thinking that taxpayers are making these payments. They are not.
BTW, pensions differ from Social Security because pensions are negotiated for as part of a total compensation package, as opposed to a “safety net” or type of insurance against living in abject poverty in old age. The benefits are not supposed to be “equal” to Social Security because it is not an insurance program.
Again, we ALL have to pay for things we don’t like. That is a FACT. It would be great if we could personally allocate specifically where we want our tax money spent, but to do so would cause far greater problems than what we have now.
The reasons for our economic problems are not at all the result of unions or pension programs. The financial sector’s and Federal Reserve’s boom-bust policies and market manipulations are largely responsible for our financial weaknesses. California’s problems exist largely because of unchecked illegal immigration which places a disproportionate burden on schools, prisons, infrastructure, etc. and lowers overal wage/employment levels of fully-documented, “legal” workers, so tax revenues go down, too. A lot of our public employees are employed because of the illegal immigrant population (about 30-60% of our student population consists of illegal immigrants and/or their children), so the two issues are very closely related.
Those are just a couple of reasons for the state’s economic problems. There are many other reasons for our poor financial condition, as well. It is not a “one issue” problem, no matter how much the corporate propagandists try to push that message in the MSM.
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BTW, the private sector discontinued pensions because shareholders and executives could be better compensated without that added expense. They did so because the idiots in the private sector belived the lies that said, “unions are bad,” and “globalization is good,” so they didn’t put up much of a fight when the unions were disbanded. In other cases, companies were very poorly managed, so they went bankrupt for reasons not related to pension obligations. Again, not a “single issue” reason for the problems with pensions in the private sector.
