One of the things that invariably grinds my gears about the state budgets is hearing people bitch and complain about the government employee pension funds.
It also grinds my gears when I hear people in the private sector do it, but there's not nearly as much complaining from the private sector people.
That fact in and of itself annoys me.
Oh, don't worry, I will explain all about it, in such exhaustive detail that you will no doubt be tired of my blather before I get done and looking for a slushee.
See, here's the first problem.
Who, I'm asking you, who, ever, told government employees that they had a ticket for life because they worked for the government for a few years?
The reason pension funds for government employees are underfunded is because there is not enough money to fill them. It's nice to claim that there wouldn't be these problems IF they were fully funded, but the bottom-line issue is that they CANNOT BE fully funded.
Want to know why?
Because in a lot of cases, we hand out lifetime pensions and medical benefits to people who work for the government for 20 years.
That sounds like a bunch, doesn't it?
Twenty whole years.
Say you get hired as a public works superintendent right out of college, diploma fresh in your hand and still warm from the press. You're 25, maybe 26; you work in that position for 20 years, maybe even making a real contribution.
Then you retire.
At 45.
And live to be 90.
That means that in exchange for your twenty years of hard work, the taxpayer picks up your tab for the next 45 years - and in a lot of cases, when you die, your spouse and kids can sue to keep the gravy train rolling.
Now, ok, maybe a public service pension won't keep you in a McMansion - although it sure seems to in California and New York - but goddamn, 45 years of pay for 20 years of work?
And meanwhile, the retirees keep rolling in. At every turn, states are faced with ever-increasing pension rolls, people who are contributing nothing, and are drawing in some cases their original full-time base pay.
And they outnumber the number of people who are paying into those plans.
They cannot be fully funded - it is inherently impossible - because they are a giant Ponzi scheme.
They just chucked some guy in jail for running one of those; Bernie Madoff, ever hear of him?
So why is it wrong for him to bilk private investors out of their hard-earned money with that scheme, but fine when the City of Los Angeles does it?
...Because L.A. is doing it to the taxpayers.
Now, far be it from me to offer criticism without a suggestion, so, here goes.
This is how to fix pension plans so that they first make sense, and second, don't screw anyone.
Begin with the notion, first, that compensation for your labor ends when your labor ends; there is no moral justification for claiming you have a "right" to still draw pay after you leave your job, regardless of your reason for bailing out.
There are those who will claim that the pension deals are "part of their compensation and they have a right to it because the state(s) agreed to those terms."
That's not strictly true.
See, the teachers, nurses, firefighters, police, and every bureaucrat who ever scuttled sideways to hide back under the rock you just turned over, are all members of unions.
And the unions, for decades, have given the state governments an ultimatum, every single year: increase the benefits, or we strike - and your state gets shut down.
There is no negotiation in good faith, when your options are "do it my way or get irrevocably fucked."
So the states have agreed under duress to incredibly onerous terms to keep their own employees at work - if you can call what a lot of the bureaucracy does work - and the result - the bill - is coming due.
Public servants have no right to unionize.
That is a fact; they have no right to strike, when they are paid from the taxpayers' pockets.
They have no right to demand more from the government - that means you and I - because they volunteered for that job.
If they don't like the pay and benefits the taxpayer offers them, they have every right to quit. And form their own company to do the same identical thing that they were doing before, and bid on a contract to provide the service.
But they don't have a right to demand that the private sector pay them more than they're worth.
And they unquestionably do; public sector jobs AVERAGE 35% more compensation than equivalent civilian jobs, now.
Which means their jobs are not worth that much, because if they WERE worth that much, someone in the private sector would be paying them that much already.
So.
Retirement is a legitimate benefit; being able to retire is a perfectly legitimate desire on the part of the worker.
But this isn't how to go about it.
The way it SHOULD BE done, is for the government to either get together with the banks to develop a financial vehicle - or simply issue it themselves - that functions similarly to a CD.
As the employee works away in their job, they contribute some portion of their pay into the account; AS PART OF THEIR COMPENSATION, the government matches the funds they contribute.
When they stop working, those matching funds stop coming, for good.
At that point, the retiree has the option to withdraw their money all at once, or get a stipend. If they have done well, and planned well, then their stipend will come out to be a good portion of their original pay rate, even if the financial vehicle in question is set at a measly rate of compound interest and acts like a savings account - the primary difference being that the funds are inaccessible until the termination of their employment for whatever reason.
It is a fixed amount of funds when they quit; if they want to live like kings, they can piss it all away - and many no doubt will.
That is not the fault either of their employer or of the taxpayer.
If they live frugally, they might very well leave a good chunk of it to their heirs - and they can, because when they retire, everything in that account is theirs - but that's all they get.
It is neither the moral responsibility, or even desirable, that the government, in any persona, should make your decisions from birth until death on the premise that you might fuck up.
Taking the chance that you might fuck up, and learning to deal with the consequences of your decisions, is part of being an adult.
I guess what I mean to say is, if you want a government job because you know the pension plan will hold your hand from the moment you start until it trades you out to the icy fingers of Old Scratch, you are a perpetual adolescent; unable to learn, or take, responsibility - and less of a person because of it.
You don't have a right to ask the government to hold your hand until you die, because the government doesn't do anything; the taxpayer does, and you don't have a right to - using the threat of a strike - force ME to take care of YOU forever.
It is not, and cannot be, moral to force others to give you their livelihoods.
That's what the pension riders are doing; they are, explicitly, stealing from the American public.
It is financially insupportable, as California is now finding out.
It is morally reprehensible.
It is theft; perhaps legal, but theft nonetheless.
For the Christian crowd, I'm gonna wow you with Biblical knowledge: Thou shalt not steal.
Thus saith the Lord.
Also, thus saith any human being, who in their boundless capacity for reason, is capable of comprehending the nature of inherent rights; that the right to your life - and thus freedom to maintain it - is the paramount, most fundamental, right that a human being can have; stealing the means of maintaining that life is murder.
Thou shalt not murder. (KJB notwithstanding, that's the accurate translation. Hebrew, yo, holographic language.)
You have no right to threaten me with crime waves, hospital shutdowns, dumber kids than we have already, and raging fires, to force me to choose between death - murder - and "almost as bad as death but not quite."
Pension plans, as they are currently structured, are morally wrong.
They should be ended as an American institution, and recognized for the communist idea they really are; income redistribution - but only to the people on the approved list.
Thank you for reading.
