A halfway decent rant on .Gov employees.

One thing just about any pension program has to have is sustainability over time.

Right now the issue in Wisconsin over public unions bargaining power is not over at this time. There will be a lot of bellyaching no matter how the issue turns out and the Republicans will get beat up over this issue for years to come.

I wonder if the mean old Republicans that are trying to rein in public union power are doing this to be mean or because they have actually learned to count.

I am not one to upeset the apple cart and if the public unions can figure a way to let some public employee retire and draw double pay for life after a brief period of service, then that's just fine by me. Hell, I'd sign right up. Of course, it is not very likely to happen.

Fact is that pensions are nothing more than money that is being given to someone that is no longer producing, plain and simple. It is a drain on the resource that is supplying it.

Before any of you pensioners go off on that statement and start in on how you gave the best years of your life, yada yada yada, stop and think for a second. What are you doing now? Are you still actively producing in the field you are drawing your pension from? Of course not, you are retired. You are Drawing a pension.

Pensions of most kinds were originally designed to keep a person too old to work from being a burden on everyone else. They were not designed so that a forty-five year old could spend the rest of his life on the golf course. Of course, there are not a whole lot of people in their forties that golf all day, but you can see the point I am making. Most people that retire from a career at an early age do something else for a while. Some start another career and work toward another pension.

A pension fund is a little like a salmon run. In order for it to keep fishermen in fish it has to be taken care of. A salmon run can sustain a limited group of fishermen with a living wage for generations if it is managed properly or it can be overfished make a few people rich for a couple years and the resource ends there.

Same holds true for pension funds. They have to be sustainable. The money has to come from somewhere.

Where?

One of the maritime unions used to have a twenty and out policy, whereby after twenty years of service a man could retire from the maritime business and collect a pension. This means that someone that entered the business at the age of twenty could start drawing something at the ripe old age of forty.

That got changed a while back as it wasn't sustainable. They decided that the money wasn't there to be able to pay a person a lifetime pension after only twenty years of service.

Let's look at a forty year old retiree that lives for another thirty-five years at half-pay for life.
Over the remaining thirty-five years of his life, he draws half pay which equals to being 17.5 years of fulll pay, adjusted for inflation over the years. He will collect this pension for 1.5 times the number of years he worked. This doesn't even start to get into the health insurance, etc that goes with the retirement package.

All of this is fine and dandy if the money is there to pay him. I don't care. It isn't coming out of my pocket.

Truth is, the public sector has come quite a way over the past umpteen years. It used to be that the public sector was really a trade-off career. It used to pay quite a bit less than its private counterpart. The trade off was security.

Years ago, the public sector, that paid somewhat less than the private sector was a secure way to go. A person so employed pretty much didn't have to worry a whole lot about layoffs and how well the company was doing. They knew that their check would be there and on time. They also knew that they would be given a modest retirement that would permit them to live out their final years in quiet dignity.

The trade-off meant that while the private sector employee was driving, for example, a Pontiac or Buick with a V-8, the public employee would likely scoot around town in a six-cylinder Ford or Chevy and maybe lived in a somewhat smaller house. Still, there was generally enough income that if the public employee was frugal, they could afford to raise a couple of kids and send them to a halfway decent college.

What has changed over the past several years is that many areas of the public sector have unionized and as a result, have collectively bargained their way up to the point where working for the government seems like it is now the way to go. In many cases the public sector is paying one hell of a lot more than the private sector does, and when you add in the benefit package and early retirement possibilities there is no wonder that the people that used to head for the big money in the private sector are running straight to government jobs.

Now they can have their cake and eat it, too. They can have the Buicks and Pontiacs and live in the big house on the hill and be secure. On top of that, they can retire early!

All this is good until someone asks the ugly question; who is paying for it?

The answer, of course, is that we all are.

My pay is sent directly to the bank electronically. I can actually look at my watch and see if I can go down to the bank and start in on paying bills. Unless I call the bank, I have no way of knowing how much money is in the bank until my pay voucher arrives in the mail a couple of days later. When I open the envelope I grind my teeth when I see how much I have coughed up in taxes.

This has not been as good a year for me as last year was, I have made a little less and paid a lot more in taxes this year, according to my tax papers and records.

While I understand that the taxes I pay are part of the cost of living in as nice a place as the United States, it galls the hell out of me that the powers that be are so damned generous with my wages.

Where is it all going? What is the government doing with my money?

Of course, some of it is going toward paying public pensions, and while I have little or no problem with the way it used to be, the way it is now leaves me a little miffed.

The teachers these days are among the biggest examples. Backed by NEA and other teachers unions, they really irk me. They work 180 days per year and want 100K per annum, which is one hell of a lot of money for a job that gives them summers off and sabbatical leave time.

Teachers seem to think that they are so great because they teach, but there is a lot of truth to the old saw. Those that can, do. Those that can't, teach.(The third part of this old saw is that those that can do neither become administrators.)

The biggest insult of a justification that I have ever heard a teacher use to justify a raise is that back in the 60s teachers were really underpaid.

Bullshit.

Not one of those teachers was forced to teach. They agreed to do the job for the pay offered. All of them had college degrees and as a result had other options. They obviously wanted to teach otherwise they would have done something else.

Also, even if they were so underpaid, how in the hell os overpaying a current teacher going to settle the so-called injustice given to the teachers of the 60s? Virtually all of the teachers that taught in the 60s are now retired. If anyone is entitled to the back pay it is them and not todays breed of teacher.

In fact, by such reasoning we ought to give every black person in the country that can prove that their ancestors were slaves a big, huge compensation check. We all know how that idea will go over. Park it alongside the clown who suggested putting screen doors in submarines.

One other small thing; If you teachers are so great, then why are we raising a generation of idiots that graduate from college that can't read and write, or more importantly, can't count. Raises to teachers should be based on merit, period. If you send a class forward that has actually learned something, fine. If not, too bad.

I don't mind paying government employees that are now too old to work, but I really don't like the idea of paying someone that golfing four times a week or is now working on his second pension and planning on double-dipping in a couple of years. As a society we seem to put a little too much stock into recreation.

It should be noted here that my Old School mother in law proudly kept working as a Registered Nurse well into her 80s. One can call the woman a double dipper because she was collecting Social Security while working full time, but the arguement holds little water. She had to collect her Social Security by law.

I read a story where a correctional officer felt he was getting screwed by the nasty old Republicans because now he had to make a choice between simply collecting a pension or coming into work. He had started drawing a retirement pension and was still coming into work at his job and getting paid his regular wage on top of his pension. Poor baby.

(There are exceptions like Sheila, an old friend of mine from High School. She got out of college and became a state social worker of some sort and worked her required years so she could pull a pension and live her dream. She now works for peanuts at a local non-profit food bank and loves it, but she has dedicated her life to helping others. She'll probably die while helping others. I respect that.)

People are now living a lot longer than they used to and that means that pension plans of all sorts, including Social Security have to pay out a lot more for a lot longer length of time. That means more money. Where is it going to come from? We have already backed up the age of retirement a couple of years for some. The next likely step is reduced benefits. What comes after that?

In addition to that, Congress, with their well known, world renowned generosity with other people's money has allowed an awful lot of people to dip out of the pot they have not paid into.

At present, things are not sustainable. The only solution is to raise more money. Maybe the government will start having bake sales, but it is not likely. What is likely is more taxation.

You simply can not take more out of a pot than you have put into it. You can not run anything of a deficeit for very long.

The answer is that sometime soon Joe Workingman is going to see a whole lot less of his pay come payday and he will notice that there is now a lot more being taken out to pay for things he will never receive. Right now there are a lot of people asking if Social Security is going to even be there when he retires.

The whole issue here that has started in Wisconsin is not that the government is being mean or cruel and doesn't like the working person. The issue here s that someone there has learned to count and the numbers are not adding up to be able to permit state employees to write their own pension plans.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. There is a big $hit sandwich being made and pretty soon it is going to be passed around and we're all going to have to take a bite. That means everyone, at least that is getting paid by the taxpayer. It also has to start at the top.

It really is no example for top leadership to cut the pay of the workers and then give themselves a raise as a reward for saving the taxpayers a big chunk of change. Leadership means setting an example and it is time for the top dogs to set one.

That doesn't seem too likely.

Can you picture Congress voting on their own pay cut?

I'm waiting, but I'll know when it is going to happen.

When I hear that Mother Teresa got busted for shooting two cops that were trying to take her in for posession of blow and solicitation of prostitution I'll start watching for Congress to cut their own pay.




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