Govt pensions should be reduced prospectively but not against those workers who have already earned them. ( That would really be unfair. )
And it would be fair to raise taxes on individuals and businesses? Hell NO!!!! As they say....You Pays your money, and takes your chances.....just like everybody else!!!
Shame on them for believing in skittle defecating unicorns!
I don’t blame members for being angry but their anger should be directed at union and political leadership for making deals everybody knew were unsustainable.
One way I would try to help them out is offering up abandoned properties tax free for cleaning up for later sale. If they want to keep the properties themselves, waive the back taxes and let them pay the taxes going forward. I think there are probably lots of options to help them out.
As far as the city is concerned, they have to ease up on taxes and regulation to bring the thriving underground economy back above ground.
Public sector pensions should be reduced to match the average private sector pension. Retroactivly.
So any promise made no matter how untenable is sacrosanct? Are you a government employee pensioner? Unions agreed to take promises in the hope that they could force contributions. The only thing that counts in a pension fund is hard assets. If the unions would have insisted on immediate cash contributions the politicians and voters would have scaled things way back. Instead they hoped to force a future someonelse to pay.
Sorry but I am under no obligation to fund promises I was not a party to.
Govt pensions should be reduced prospectively but not against those workers who have already earned them. ( That would really be unfair. )"I completely disagree. A contract that has no reasonable expectation of performance is not enforceable. The fact that union workers in the public sector sent their representatives to negotiate in bad faith, basically holding a gun to the the other party until their demands were met, and came out with promises that were a mathematical impossibility is not only the fault of the union leaders and pol's. It is also the fault of EVERY SINGLE UNION EMPLOYEE who advocated the position or silently sat back and quietly capitalized on it.
That would obviously have been the better course of action, but it would have required that an effective remedial plan had been adopted long before Detroit hit the wall. Instead, the looters continued to loot, and assumed that the money could somehow be found. Big mistake.
Detroit simply doesn't have the money to pay the pensions. Period. And it has no plausible way to get the money. The only way to protect the pensions would be for someone else to step up and bail them out. "Someone else," of course, means State of Michigan or federal taxpayers, and there is no reason any of these folks should be dinged to pay for corrupt deals to which they were not a party.
Fair IMO depends on whether they were reasonable and whether they gave up SS IMO.
It's unfortunate, but who else is responsible, besides the city of Detroit?