Jim and I have been saying for years that pensions are bankrupting the States, you know the problem must be completely out of hand if the New York Times is reporting the crisis. These pensions were unsustainable from the getgo and should have never been negoiated in the first place. One way to solve both the public pension problem and the social security problem at once is to transfer all public pensions funds to social security and have everyone recieve social security. Be sure to visit the New York Times for links associated with the story.
Cathy
Spelling errors, grammar errors, misuse of homonyms and typos are left as an exercise for my readers.
PAYBACK TIME
In Budget Crisis, States Take Aim at Pension Costs
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH
Published: June 19, 2010
Many states are acknowledging this year that they have promised pensions they cannot afford and are cutting once-sacrosanct benefits, to appease taxpayers and attack budget deficits.
Enlarge This Image
Seth Perlman/Associated Press
Gov. Pat Quinn said an overhaul would save Illinois’s pension system $300 million in its first year. But the fund is weakened.
Payback Time
Untouchable Benefits
Articles in this series are examining the consequences of, and efforts to deal with, growing public and private debts.
Previous Articles in the Series »
Illinois raised its retirement age to 67, the highest of any state, and capped public pensions at $106,800 a year. Arizona, New York, Missouri and Mississippi will make people work more years to earn pensions. Virginia is requiring employees to pay into the state pension fund for the first time. New Jersey will not give anyone pension credit unless they work at least 32 hours a week.
“We can’t afford to deny reality or delay action any longer,” said Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois, adding that his state’s pension cuts, enacted in March, will save some $300 million in the first year alone.
But there is a catch: Nearly all of the cuts so far apply only to workers not yet hired. Though heralded as breakthrough reforms by state officials, the cuts phase in so slowly they are unlikely to save the weakest funds and keep them from running out of money. Some new rules may even hasten the demise of the funds they were meant to protect.
Lawmakers wanted to avoid legal battles or fights with unions, whose members can be influential voters. So they are allowing most public workers across the country to keep building up their pensions at the same rate as ever. The tens of thousands of workers now on Illinois’s payrolls, for instance, will still get to retire at 60 — and some will as young as 55.
One striking exception is Colorado, which has imposed cuts on its current workers, not just future hires, and even on people who have already retired. The retirees have sued to block the reduction.
Other states with shrinking funds and deep fiscal distress may be pushed in this direction and tempted to follow Colorado’s example in the coming years. Though most state officials believe they are legally bound to shield current workers from pension cuts, a Colorado victory could embolden them to be more aggressive.
Colorado pruned a 3.5 percent annual pension increase to 2 percent, concluding that was the fastest way to revive its pension fund, which was projected to run out of money by 2029. The cut may sound small, but it produces big results because it goes into effect immediately. State plans vary widely, but many have other costly features, like subsidized early-retirement benefits, which could likewise be trimmed for existing workers.
Despite its pension reform, Illinois is still in deep trouble. That vaunted $300 million in immediate savings? The state produced it by giving itself credit now for the much smaller checks it will send retirees many years in the future — people who must first be hired and then, for full benefits, work until age 67.
By recognizing those far-off savings right away, Illinois is letting itself put less money into its pension fund now, starting with $300 million this year.
That saves the state money, but it also weakens the pension fund, actually a family of funds, raising the risk of a collapse long before the real savings start to materialize.
“We’re within a few years of having some of the pension funds run out of money,” said R. Eden Martin, president of the Commercial Club of Chicago, a business group that has been warning of a “financial implosion” for several years. “Funding for the schools is going to be cut radically. Funding for Medicaid. As these things all mount up, there’s going to be a lot of outrage.”
Joshua D. Rauh, an associate professor of finance at Northwestern University who studies public pension funds, predicts that at the current rate, Illinois’s pension system could run out of money by 2018. He believes the funds of other troubled states — including New Jersey, Indiana and Connecticut — are also on track to run out of money in less than a decade, unless they make meaningful changes.
If a state pension fund ran out of money, the state would be legally bound to make good on retirees’ benefits. But paying public pensions straight out of general revenue would be ruinous. In Illinois’s case, it would consume about half the state’s cash every year, bringing other vital state services to a standstill.
Mr. Rauh said he thinks any state caught in that trap would have little choice but to seek a federal bailout. Bigger pension contributions and higher taxes can go only so far.
Many state officials, hoping for a huge recovery in the markets, say that such projections are too pessimistic, and that cutting benefits for future workers must suffice, given laws and provisions in state constitutions that make membership in a state pension fund a contractual relationship that cannot be breached.
Lawyers, though, are raising the possibility that those laws are being misinterpreted.
“It makes no sense to suggest that an employee who works for the state for a single day has acquired a right to have future pension benefits calculated for the next 20 to 40 years under whatever method was in effect on that single first day of service,” states a legal memorandum prepared for the Commercial Club of Chicago, which is concerned that a public pension collapse would badly damage the city’s business climate.
The club’s members include senior executives of big companies, like Boeing, Aon, Kraft, Motorola and I.B.M., that have frozen pensions or slowed the rates at which their workers build up benefits.
Some of those cuts set off titanic battles. The most famous was at I.B.M., which changed its pension plan just when many of its older workers were about to earn sharply higher retirement benefits. Aggrieved workers sued, but after a long battle, a federal appellate court found that the cuts were legal.
“An employer is free to move from one legal plan to another legal plan, provided that it does not diminish vested interests,” or the benefits workers have already earned, wrote Chief Judge Frank H. Easterbrook of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago. He did not distinguish between corporate employers and states.
Colorado is basing its legal defense, in part, on a 1961 state supreme court ruling that said pension cuts for current workers were allowed if “actuarially necessary,” and will argue that it applies to retirees as well. Other states may not have such legal tools.
In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has gone a different route, bargaining with the 12 unions that represent public employees. Last week four of them agreed to let the state cut its own contributions by requiring current workers to pay sharply more for the same pensions. The workers will contribute 10 percent of their pay, in some cases double the previous rate, to the state pension fund. Some other states are raising employee contributions as well, though less sharply.
In New Jersey, the administration of Gov. Christopher J. Christie recently imposed pension cuts on future hires, but has been quietly looking into whether it could also reduce the benefits that current employees expect to accumulate in the coming years.
“Can they change the benefit formula going forward? Sure. It’s not etched in stone,” said Edward Thomson III, an actuary and trustee of the New Jersey pension system who was asked to offer an opinion on whether New Jersey could adopt the federal pension law — the one that covers companies — as its governing statute.
A state assemblyman, Declan J. O’Scanlon Jr., recently introduced a bill to ratchet back a 9 percent pension increase that the state gave most workers in 2001.
“I think this will pass constitutional muster,” Mr. O’Scanlon said. “Otherwise, I fear the whole system will fall apart. Nine years — we’re out of money.”
Amy Schoenfeld contributed reporting.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Reason Number 478 why Public Schools are bad for America
The following is a phone conversation between Dr. Savage and Jo.
When you fail to educate generations of students you will end up with people like Jo.
Cathy
Spelling errors, grammar errors, misuse of homonyms and typos are left as an exercise for my readers.
When you fail to educate generations of students you will end up with people like Jo.
Cathy
Spelling errors, grammar errors, misuse of homonyms and typos are left as an exercise for my readers.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Reason Number 368 why Public Schools are bad for America
We would be out of this economic mess if the government did not intervene, but because we fail to educate the populous on both history and economics we are not out of this economic mess. The following piece appears on the Washington Examiner.
Quote of the Day - “An economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance our budget, just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits.” JFK
Cathy
Spelling errors, grammar errors, misuse of homonyms and typos are left as an exercise for my readers.
Thomas Sowell: The myth of how the Great Depression was resolved
By: THOMAS SOWELL
Examiner Columnist
June 18, 2010
Sometimes you can read a book that will change your mind on some fundamental issue. Rarely, however, is there just one page that can undermine or destroy a widely-held belief. But there is such a page-- page 77 of the book "Out of Work" by Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway.
The widespread belief is that government intervention is the key to getting the country out of a serious economic downturn. The example often cited is President Franklin D. Roosevelt's intervention, after the stock market crash of 1929 was followed by the Great Depression of the 1930s, with its massive and long-lasting unemployment.
This is more than just a question about history. Right here and right now there is a widespread belief that the unregulated market is what got us into our present economic predicament, and that the government must "do something" to get the economy moving again. FDR's intervention in the 1930s has often been cited by those who think this way.
What is on that one page in "Out of Work" that could change people's minds? Just a simple table, giving unemployment rates for every month during the entire decade of the 1930s.
Those who think that the stock market crash in October 1929 is what caused the huge unemployment rates of the 1930s will have a hard time reconciling that belief with the data in that table.
Although the big stock market crash occurred in October 1929, unemployment never reached double digits in any of the next 12 months after that crash. Unemployment peaked at 9 percent, two months after the stock market crashed-- and then began drifting generally downward over the next six months, falling to 6.3 percent by June 1930.
This was what happened in the market, before the federal government decided to "do something."
What the government decided to do in June 1930-- against the advice of literally a thousand economists, who took out newspaper ads warning against it-- was impose higher tariffs, in order to save American jobs by reducing imported goods.
This was the first massive federal intervention to rescue the economy, under President Herbert Hoover, who took pride in being the first President of the United States to intervene to try to get the economy out of an economic downturn.
Within six months after this government intervention, unemployment shot up into double digits-- and stayed in double digits in every month throughout the entire remainder of the decade of the 1930s, as the Roosevelt administration expanded federal intervention far beyond what Hoover had started.
If more government regulation of business is the magic answer that so many seem to think it is, the whole history of the 1930s would have been different. An economic study in 2004 concluded that New Deal policies prolonged the Great Depression. But the same story can be found on one page in "Out of Work."
While the market produced a peak unemployment rate of 9 percent-- briefly-- after the stock market crash of 1929, unemployment shot up after massive federal interventions in the economy. It rose above 20 percent in 1932 and stayed above 20 percent for 23 consecutive months, beginning in the Hoover administration and continuing during the Roosevelt administration.
As Casey Stengel used to say, "You could look it up." It is all there on that one page.
Those who are convinced that the government has to "do something" when the economy has a problem almost never bother to find out what actually happens when the government intervenes.
The very fact that we still remember the stock market crash of 1929 is remarkable, since there was a similar stock market crash in 1987 that most people have long since forgotten.
What was the difference between these two stock market crashes? The 1929 stock market crash was followed by the most catastrophic depression in American history, with as many as one-fourth of all American workers being unemployed. The 1987 stock market crash was followed by two decades of economic growth with low unemployment.
But that was only one difference. The other big difference was that the Reagan administration did not intervene in the economy after the 1987 stock market crash-- despite many outcries in the media that the government should "do something."
Examiner Columnist Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and is nationally syndicated by Creators Syndicate.
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/The-myth-of-how-the-Great-Depression-was-resolved-96592879.html#ixzz0rJz9i8BW
Quote of the Day - “An economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance our budget, just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits.” JFK
Cathy
Spelling errors, grammar errors, misuse of homonyms and typos are left as an exercise for my readers.
Thomas Sowell: The myth of how the Great Depression was resolved
By: THOMAS SOWELL
Examiner Columnist
June 18, 2010
Sometimes you can read a book that will change your mind on some fundamental issue. Rarely, however, is there just one page that can undermine or destroy a widely-held belief. But there is such a page-- page 77 of the book "Out of Work" by Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway.
The widespread belief is that government intervention is the key to getting the country out of a serious economic downturn. The example often cited is President Franklin D. Roosevelt's intervention, after the stock market crash of 1929 was followed by the Great Depression of the 1930s, with its massive and long-lasting unemployment.
This is more than just a question about history. Right here and right now there is a widespread belief that the unregulated market is what got us into our present economic predicament, and that the government must "do something" to get the economy moving again. FDR's intervention in the 1930s has often been cited by those who think this way.
What is on that one page in "Out of Work" that could change people's minds? Just a simple table, giving unemployment rates for every month during the entire decade of the 1930s.
Those who think that the stock market crash in October 1929 is what caused the huge unemployment rates of the 1930s will have a hard time reconciling that belief with the data in that table.
Although the big stock market crash occurred in October 1929, unemployment never reached double digits in any of the next 12 months after that crash. Unemployment peaked at 9 percent, two months after the stock market crashed-- and then began drifting generally downward over the next six months, falling to 6.3 percent by June 1930.
This was what happened in the market, before the federal government decided to "do something."
What the government decided to do in June 1930-- against the advice of literally a thousand economists, who took out newspaper ads warning against it-- was impose higher tariffs, in order to save American jobs by reducing imported goods.
This was the first massive federal intervention to rescue the economy, under President Herbert Hoover, who took pride in being the first President of the United States to intervene to try to get the economy out of an economic downturn.
Within six months after this government intervention, unemployment shot up into double digits-- and stayed in double digits in every month throughout the entire remainder of the decade of the 1930s, as the Roosevelt administration expanded federal intervention far beyond what Hoover had started.
If more government regulation of business is the magic answer that so many seem to think it is, the whole history of the 1930s would have been different. An economic study in 2004 concluded that New Deal policies prolonged the Great Depression. But the same story can be found on one page in "Out of Work."
While the market produced a peak unemployment rate of 9 percent-- briefly-- after the stock market crash of 1929, unemployment shot up after massive federal interventions in the economy. It rose above 20 percent in 1932 and stayed above 20 percent for 23 consecutive months, beginning in the Hoover administration and continuing during the Roosevelt administration.
As Casey Stengel used to say, "You could look it up." It is all there on that one page.
Those who are convinced that the government has to "do something" when the economy has a problem almost never bother to find out what actually happens when the government intervenes.
The very fact that we still remember the stock market crash of 1929 is remarkable, since there was a similar stock market crash in 1987 that most people have long since forgotten.
What was the difference between these two stock market crashes? The 1929 stock market crash was followed by the most catastrophic depression in American history, with as many as one-fourth of all American workers being unemployed. The 1987 stock market crash was followed by two decades of economic growth with low unemployment.
But that was only one difference. The other big difference was that the Reagan administration did not intervene in the economy after the 1987 stock market crash-- despite many outcries in the media that the government should "do something."
Examiner Columnist Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and is nationally syndicated by Creators Syndicate.
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/The-myth-of-how-the-Great-Depression-was-resolved-96592879.html#ixzz0rJz9i8BW
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Reason Number 325 Why I don't like Public Schools
The following sets of videos are by Milton Friedman one of America's greatest economists and appear on YouTube.
We fail to educate the truth about free markets, free markets perform harmony and world peace. We fail to teach economics including the benefits of capitalism and the failures of communism.
Quote of the Day - "If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand”
~Milton Friedman
Cathy
Spelling errors, grammar errors, misuse of homonyms and typos are left as an exercise for my readers.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Taxpayer Funded Socialist Indoctrination Centers
Do you want your child chanting, "I am an Obama scholar?"
This video speaks for itself.
“We live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate we can imagine or explore. All you have to do to educate a child is leave him alone and teach him to read. The rest is brainwashing.” `Ellen Gilcrist
Cathy
Spelling errors, grammar errors, misuse of homonyms and typos are left as an exercise for my readers.
This video speaks for itself.
“We live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate we can imagine or explore. All you have to do to educate a child is leave him alone and teach him to read. The rest is brainwashing.” `Ellen Gilcrist
Cathy
Spelling errors, grammar errors, misuse of homonyms and typos are left as an exercise for my readers.
Reason Number 311 Why I don't like Public Schools
Condoms for elementary students? Yes. You can't indoctrinate the populous with out breaking down the relationship between parent and child. Yet another reason for school choice.
The following piece appears on Todd Starnes.com.
Cathy
Spelling errors, grammar errors, misuse of homonyms and typos are left as an exercise for my readers.
School to Provide Condoms for 11-Year-Olds
A New England school district has approved a measure that will provide free condoms to elementary school students and direct teachers not to comply with parental wishes to the contrary.
The policy, unanimously approved by the Provincetown School Committee does not include an age limit — meaning children of any age ask for — and receive — free condoms.
The committee also directed school leaders not to honor requests from any parent who might object to their child receiving condoms. In other words mommy and daddy — you don’t have a right to prevent your 7-year-old from getting a contraceptive device.
The policy does stipulate that kids must consult with a nurse or trained counselor before getting their sexual protection – and that upset some of the committee members, according to the Provincetown Banner.
“I can see some kids opting out because of the conversation. I’m not against [the policy]. I’m just trying to put myself in that teenager’s spot,” said committee member Carrie Notaro.
“I don’t like that students can’t be discreet about this,” committee member Shannon Patrick told the newspaper. “They have to go and ask for it. I’d rather them not have the conservation [with counselors] and have the condom than not have the condom.”
School superintendent Beth Singer supported the instruction aspect of the rule – explaining that younger boys and girls might not be experienced in such adult matters.
“We’re talking about younger kids,” she told the newspaper. “They have questions they need answered on how to use them, when to use them.”
Reaction has been mixed on newspaper websites. One reader opposed to t he measure wrote, “A condom distribution policy at the elementary school? Twelve-year-old kids need condoms? When I was 12, I thought a peck on the lips was something.”
Another reader wrote, “Stupidity exists everywhere. Why not just give the kids free needles while we’re at it?”
However, a supporter of the measure praised committee members.
“If the kids really are sexually active that young these days, then they absolutely should have access to condoms. Sure, it’s demoralizing to think of 11 and 12-year-olds starting at that age, but if they are, they’re not going to stop.”
Todd Starnes is a FOX News Radio reporter and author. For more information on his books, click here.
The following piece appears on Todd Starnes.com.
Cathy
Spelling errors, grammar errors, misuse of homonyms and typos are left as an exercise for my readers.
School to Provide Condoms for 11-Year-Olds
A New England school district has approved a measure that will provide free condoms to elementary school students and direct teachers not to comply with parental wishes to the contrary.
The policy, unanimously approved by the Provincetown School Committee does not include an age limit — meaning children of any age ask for — and receive — free condoms.
The committee also directed school leaders not to honor requests from any parent who might object to their child receiving condoms. In other words mommy and daddy — you don’t have a right to prevent your 7-year-old from getting a contraceptive device.
The policy does stipulate that kids must consult with a nurse or trained counselor before getting their sexual protection – and that upset some of the committee members, according to the Provincetown Banner.
“I can see some kids opting out because of the conversation. I’m not against [the policy]. I’m just trying to put myself in that teenager’s spot,” said committee member Carrie Notaro.
“I don’t like that students can’t be discreet about this,” committee member Shannon Patrick told the newspaper. “They have to go and ask for it. I’d rather them not have the conservation [with counselors] and have the condom than not have the condom.”
School superintendent Beth Singer supported the instruction aspect of the rule – explaining that younger boys and girls might not be experienced in such adult matters.
“We’re talking about younger kids,” she told the newspaper. “They have questions they need answered on how to use them, when to use them.”
Reaction has been mixed on newspaper websites. One reader opposed to t he measure wrote, “A condom distribution policy at the elementary school? Twelve-year-old kids need condoms? When I was 12, I thought a peck on the lips was something.”
Another reader wrote, “Stupidity exists everywhere. Why not just give the kids free needles while we’re at it?”
However, a supporter of the measure praised committee members.
“If the kids really are sexually active that young these days, then they absolutely should have access to condoms. Sure, it’s demoralizing to think of 11 and 12-year-olds starting at that age, but if they are, they’re not going to stop.”
Todd Starnes is a FOX News Radio reporter and author. For more information on his books, click here.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Husband Asked Me to Pick Up Something from the Store
What was it?
Cathy
Spelling errors, grammar errors, misuse of homonyms and typos are left as an exercise for my readers.
Cathy
Spelling errors, grammar errors, misuse of homonyms and typos are left as an exercise for my readers.
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