Maggie's Farm

"State employees game the system"

There is a lot wrong with public employee retirement system but the author failed to mention them. Instead he described the symptoms and the scapegoats.
Here is where state retirement systems went wrong: 1. The state is not required to fund the system. That is the retirement system is like your 401k where your employer puts in a matching 6% but the state does not. The legislature allowed the various state entities to push of this funding into the future. But the last 34 years or so has seen the largest increase in the stock market in history. So while the emloyees contribution has grown dramatically the state was spending the money they should have put into the employees "401k". No the piper must be paid and the state has pissed away the money. 2. Firemen and police are eligible for a larger and earlier pension that was implemented by the legislature but never funded with larger deductions. The plan was quite simple they would just take some of everyone else's retirement money to fund the union supported firemen and police retirement. Over time this has seriously overdrawn the assets of the retirement fund. 3. Most employees retire with a stipend based on the value of their assets in the system. That is if your contribution is now worth $100,000 and the states matching contribution also worth $100,000 your monthly retirement is calculated using standard actuary tables and your retirement income is fair and appropriate. But some employees get a huge unearned benefit and their retirement is based on the last three years income. Typically these "lucky" people are aides to legislators or high placed union members who have been "awarded" a high paying job for the last three years of their government service as a gift paid for by tax payers and the rest of the government employees in the system.

It is these three major faults that have caused the problem and the various special interests pushing for reform are not pushing for any changes to these problems. Instead they are tryng to keep the corrupt system and make everyone in it take a haircut. They use inflamatory rhetoric as was seen in this article to push for some way they can back out of their side of the agreement. Imagine how angry you would be if your employer had not funded your 401k over the years and you didn't know this until retirement and now he wanted to seek a legal exemption from his misappropriation of your money. Make no mistake they are misrepresenting this issue and their goal is to hide their political and perhaps even criiminal mistakes that caused this problem.

Sports stadiums. Follow the money. Union built, millions, hundreds of millions. followed by large donations from the unions and a guaranteed voting block.