Post #381,592
10/4/13 7:49:10 AM
|
What pisses me off about this
What do the debt ceiling, Social Security, and public pensions have in common?
In all three cases people have already given their end of the deal and now the Republicans are trying to welsh on their end.
* Congress voted for all the things that we're in debt for, and we've already gotten the goods and services. Now they don't want to pay.
* Retirees and those soon-to-retire have already paid in, now they want to get it back and somehow those T-bills aren't as real as the ones investors hold.
* Public employees accepted lower-than-market wages for years because of the benefits, including good health care and retirement. Now that they need those services it's being threatened retroactively.
People bitch about unions. At least when they re-write a contract it's only the new members who get the shaft.
--
Drew
|
Post #381,594
10/4/13 8:36:57 AM
|
detroit is republican?
what is happening with public pensions municipal and state is easy to explain. Back in the mid 80's the stock market was booming and cities thought they could invest their way into the future and no longer had to use tax payer money to fund these thing and slashed payments into the funds.
oops.
Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 58 years. meep
|
Post #381,595
10/4/13 8:46:54 AM
|
Um, NO.
You got the era right (1980's) but your reasons are all completely wrong. The problem was and is Reaganomics. Look it up. Or as the late Dan Jenkins described it in his book about the PGA Golf Tour through the main character Kenny Lee Pucket:
I mean all I know about the real world - or what you call your commerce - is that some guys sell little ones, some guys sell big ones, some of it comes in on trains and some of it goes out on barges, a guy named Irving is locked up in a closet somewhere to figure it all out, most of it adds up to an argument in a courtroom, and all the people who're lucky enough to be hanging around drinking at all the country clubs get to shit on everybody else.
|
Post #381,625
10/4/13 4:25:26 PM
|
not hardly, Senator Mark Begich
myself and others were pitted against folks who insisted that the money being made by the pension investments in the Anchorage pension funds meant that no further payments needed to be made. Mark was assemblyman for east anchorage where I was a resident at the time. It wasn't reagan at all.
Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 58 years. meep
|
Post #381,667
10/5/13 8:43:23 AM
|
Try AGAIN.
The raiding of pension plans is a back-handed way for companies to get access to workers' and retirees' pension money that otherwise would be off-limits to them. This type of raiding began in 1980 when foreign investors got wise to a loophole in the federal private pension law that allowed them to finance the takeover of A & P with pension money. All they had to do was cancel the plan and pay workers and retirees their benefits that had been frozen at the time of termination. Then they were free to scoop up any money over that amount--misdefined as the "surplus."
In 1984 the Reagan Administration made it even easier to get at pension-plan money. It issued guidelines allowing companies to siphon the surplus from ongoing plans using "sham" terminations, a technical maneuver to restart or continue a plan at a bare-bones funding level. This opened a Pandora's box and encouraged even more firms to pull out money. At last count, more than 1,400 companies have drained $17 billion of so-called "surplus assets" out of conventional pension plans to finance takeovers, leveraged buyouts and other short-term ventures.
http://articles.lati...5_1_pension-plans
|
Post #381,679
10/5/13 10:07:53 AM
|
you are addressing private looting of pension plans
I was addressing public employee pensions and why they were not properly funded by governmental entities as observed directly by me at the time it took place in a smallish city in Alaska.
Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 58 years. meep
|
Post #381,684
10/5/13 10:50:55 AM
10/5/13 10:52:05 AM
|
There are many thieves.
Most of them live on that damnable island between the East and Hudson Rivers. You should read the article Ashton posted from Rolling Stone.
The bottom line is that the "unfunded liability" crisis is, if not exactly fictional, certainly exaggerated to an outrageous degree. Yes, we live in a new economy and, yes, it may be time to have a discussion about whether certain kinds of public employees should be receiving sizable benefit checks until death. But the idea that these benefit packages are causing the fiscal crises in our states is almost entirely a fabrication crafted by the very people who actually caused the problem. It's like Voltaire's maxim about noses having evolved to fit spectacles, so therefore we wear spectacles. In this case, we have an unfunded-pension-liability problem because we've been ripping retirees off for decades  but the solution being offered is to rip them off even more.
Edited by mmoffitt
Oct. 5, 2013, 10:52:05 AM EDT
|