ERD50
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Don
I checked out the book reviews on Amazons. The fact that it was WSJ reporter and not a Rolling Stones or Mother Jones reporter gives some credibility to your outrages. I'll put on my library list although I suspect that it will be a while before I get my hands on it. It appears from the reviews that there is another side to story. ...
I look forward to your cool-headed review.
This union trick is so far over the line it should be criminal or at the very least confined to IL and LA.
Thanks for putting it in perspective! Dang, that is bad!
Where were the auditors ?
You may have missed my quote in post #2 - this was made legal -
Gannon, former president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, was able to take a long leave from a city job to work for a union and then receive a city pension based on a high union salary. That arrangement is allowed under a state law signed by Gov. Jim Thompson on his last day in office in 1991, according to an investigation by the Tribune and WGN-TV.
Now, the people concerned with the solidity of the pension fund should be waving the red flag on this, but THAT is the crux of this problem. You've got the higher-up Union guys negotiating with politicians, but the politicians are typically put in office with the support of the Unions. So the Union is essentially represented on BOTH sides of the table. The taxpayers, and to some degree, the 'rank and file' Union workers are not represented to the same degree. So the Union higher-ups are able to wrangle these outrageous deals at the expense of taxpayers AND the people they are supposed to be representing. This system needs to be trashed.
One of the problems I note in the entire debate is that somehow people latch onto a few individual cases of people that were in a position to game a pension system. This seems to get applied to all pensions of the rank and file who are not in a position to game anything. ...
This seems to come up in these pension discussions, and I disagree. I absolutely know that not all rank and file are able to game the system. But that doesn't make these cases any less wrong. And they are not rare. The spiking issue is particularly wide-spread.
It is not as often that the story that goes rabid is one about people having the rug pulled out from under them with pensions that would have been rather modest and hard earned. ...
I think maybe you are looking at things through filtered lenses. I'm quite certain that any pension cuts made to rank and file public workers would make plenty of news. For one, I think it is pretty rare, but it would be outrageous and, I suspect, widely reported. In fact, I think there was a thread on this recently, some town that just can't afford to pay the pensions now? The prospect of making adjustments to FUTURE pensions of people not even hired yet got plenty of air-time here in IL - that's no changes to previous earned benefits, and no changes for any current workers, but it still made headlines. I can't even imagine the fever pitch of reporting if any rank-and-file got 'the rug pulled out from under them' for previously earned benefits (in fact, it appears to be unconstitutional in IL).
What is creepy is that one starts getting the similar questions about ways people's private retirement savings are decreased in potential value by forces larger than themselves like the zero return for years on simple savings accounts. No place to hide? No way to win? Sometimes I think I will see a giant clawback of any wages that were not spent as they were earned. (Just a paranoid thought.)
Are you looking for guarantees? Who is going to provide those, and how? I think we need to be honest with ourselves, and acknowledge there is risk in everything, and deal with it.
-ERD50