51–60 of 191 posts
I'm slightly shocked that the WSJ would print it (the graph, not the article).
About 25 years ago in California, Orange Country went bankrupt and public employees had to do "give backs" of (if I remember correctly) about 1/2 of their retirement funds and other concessions. I think that this will be the model for the future, but a state levels. It may not seem fair to change the rules on public employees, but effectively the rules have changed for private employees because the economy at federal…
It's worth observing that: 1) Orange County went bankrupt by cooking the books. After the scandal broke, their treasurer went to jail. 2) The Republican administration turned a blind eye to the Democratic treasurer's malfeasance because it was allowing them to keep taxes very low, which was making their government very popular. 3) The government refused to raise even a temporary tax to avoid bankruptcy, as that posit…
I have a feeling these graphs do more to explain the problems that Berkeley professor wrote about ( http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/08/24/a-letter-to-my-students... ) than the explanations he proposed.
In addition when you know an employee is going to cost you a lot of money in pension, the incentive to reduce the work force as much as possible is high.
You end up in a situation where your budget is used to pay for the retired employees and you have nothing left for active employees.
One of the reasons you are there is that it's pretty tempting for someone in command to offer a lot in pension. Under his command the budget remains clean and the employees are happy. That has got to ease elections!
One way to avoid that would be to change the way the yearly budget is computed so that it includes "known future expenses" clearly.
He got that exactly right, unfortunately he didn't go far enough -- debt financed projects are also a huge problem. Look at the big dig & the mbta. People need to learn that you pay as you go, that's why 401ks are great the total cost of an employee is understood completely. Taking debt in someone else's name, which is what essentially all government debt is, is fundamentally immoral and shouldn't be allowed. It caus…
Over the last year I've begun to wonder if people aren't going to start feeling like the deal is off. If granddad elected somebody who made so much of a debt obligation that my taxes can't fix the roads? Why does granddad get to leave me his debt? He's not even around anymore. How can dead people vote to make living people 100 years later poor? In some ways this was the exact same problem the colonies were having with Great Britain -- taxation without representation. One bunch of people making the rules and taxes, and another bunch of people having to live it. (And yes, I'm aware of the counter-argument that current voters can change the budget at will, but for all intents and purposes, practically speaking these things are our "legacy" code. We're stuck with them by default. It takes great upheaval to change even the smallest of things in these matters)
I don't think we're there yet. But we're not far off.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's worth observing that: 1) Orange County went bankrupt by cooking the books. After the scandal broke, their treasurer went to jail. 2) The Republican administration turned a blind eye to the Democratic treasurer's malfeasance because it was allowing them to keep taxes very low, which was making their government very popular. 3) The government refused to raise even a temporary tax to avoid bankruptcy, as that posit…
This is a GOP strategy called "starve the beast", and Paul Krugman has been writing about it for years: http://www.google.com/search?q=starve+the+beast+krugman
The theory is that you can so overload the government that it simply can't stand up anymore (like the USSR I suppose). It crumbles, and that gives you the opportunity to erect a new one in its place, doing away with all those things that stand in your way, like Constitutional restrictions on the government.
UPDATE: the name is "Cloward-Piven" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloward%E2%80%93Piven_strategy#... ), see my follow-up below.
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He got that exactly right, unfortunately he didn't go far enough -- debt financed projects are also a huge problem. Look at the big dig & the mbta. People need to learn that you pay as you go, that's why 401ks are great the total cost of an employee is understood completely. Taking debt in someone else's name, which is what essentially all government debt is, is fundamentally immoral and shouldn't be allowed. It caus…
Interesting point about taking debt in someone else's name. Over the last year I've begun to wonder if people aren't going to start feeling like the deal is off. If granddad elected somebody who made so much of a debt obligation that my taxes can't fix the roads? Why does granddad get to leave me his debt? He's not even around anymore. How can dead people vote to make living people 100 years later poor? In some ways…
Interesting idea. The American Revolution dealt with geographical representation. You're making an argument for temporal representation as well.
This seems worth some pondering...
Who's lending California this money now? It seems quiet a risky deal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was before federal workers earned twice as much as their private counterparts. "Federal civil servants earned average pay and benefits of $123,049 in 2009 while private workers made $61,051 in total compensation, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The data are the latest available." http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/federal-workers-earning-doubl...
I'm sympathetic to your point, but you can't really make this comparison, because it's apples-to-oranges. The set of jobs in each set is quite different. For example, there are few farmers in the government employ. However, we can still reach interesting conclusions from the data. For example, I would expect that regardless of the salary of the job, benefits such as healthcare insurance would be fairly constant for e…
If only.