Tag: pensions

Winners in the pension reform debate? Not workers and not NJ taxpayers

Tom Moran says it took “real leadership” for the state Senate to change the state’s pension and benefit rules.

I’d call it shortsighted — and not because it has angered the state’s public worker unions.

The problem with the reform bill, which passed today, is that it accelerates the race to the bottom. The argument being made is that public worker benefits must be brought in line with private sector ones, that the public workers are getting a free ride paid for by the rest of us. It is a brilliant move, of course, because it divides workers, pitting them against each other and ending any chance that workers will act in unison and demand better retirement and health benefits.

Instead, we have private sector folks demanding that public worker benefits be gutted, that they be made to deal with the same crappy benefits offered by the private sector.

The problems we face were created by state legislators and governors of both parties who refused to pay what was needed into the state pension fund over the last two decades and who have spent longer than that pretending that we can expand services without asking anyone to pay.

And now that the bill has come due, we expect the court clerk and the cop on the beat to cover the tab.

We should be demanding that private sector workers get the same benefits as public workers, that we get the same pension benefits and that the rich — who are paying less in taxes now and who are raking in record profits — cover the costs. That can’t happen as long as we scapegoat unions and public sector workers.

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  • Read poetry at The Subterranean.
  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
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Tell me again who’s at fault for the pension mess

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640

The state treasurer announced today that the state pension shortfall is at an all-time high.

As reported by The Star-Ledger, the shortfall grew by more than $8 billion over the last fiscal year to about $53.9 billion — an astronmical number that dwarfs the state’s annual budget. All told, the state pension system, the story says, “is 62 percent funded.”

The report offered the Christie administration an opportunity to continue its push for pension reform, which State Treasurer Andrew Sidamon-Eristoff said include “rolling back a 9 percent increase in pensions given by the Legislature in 2001, and upping workers’ contributions to 8.5 percent across the board,” according to the paper.

“Unchecked, the cost of this impossible burden will fall not just on the taxpayers of today, but on future generations of New Jerseyans,” he said.

That governor, he plays hard ball. He also is proving to be an ideological hack who seems unconcerned with the facts of the pension crisis. Remember, the governor followed in the footsteps of nearly every predecessor going back to the early days of the Whitman administration by failing to pay into the pension system. The $3.1 billion pension payment he didn’t make accounts for nearly 40 percent of the growth in the unfunded obligation.

And the governor, as Chris Hayes pointed out the other night on Countdown, seems prepared to default on the state’s obligations to its workers — cops and firefighters, teachers and roadworkers, secretaries and others — rather than a) asking taxpayers for more money or b) getting in the bondholders’ faces.

As Dean Baker, an economist with the left-leaning Center for Economic Policy and Research, point out, the pensions are contractual obligations, a promise made to the people who work for the various levels of government in the state. Threatening default — or at least alluding to it — is irresponsible and morally questionable. It is blackmail, plain and simple, and just more evidence that this supposedly no-nonsense governor is really just a bully.

  • Send me an e-mail.
  • Read poetry at The Subterranean.
  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
  • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.