Posted on 02/06/2005 10:16:43 PM PST by SmithL
THIS IS how California politics work these days. In lean times, Sacramento balances its budgets with smoke and mirrors and desperate deals that trade savings today for bonuses tomorrow. In flush times, when tax revenue pours into state and local coffers in buckets, punch-drunk lawmakers give away the store. Public-employee unions greedily take advantage of the spend-happy mood. Later, when the spigot stops gushing, state and local pols realize they gave away too much, but the new bennies are set in stone. What has been given with little thought cannot be taken back without great deliberation.
So, as President Bush looks at privatizing Social Security for ideological reasons, California Republicans are looking at privatizing the pensions of local and state workers out of pure desperation.
In 1999, Sacramento increased benefits for state workers retiring at age 55 when it passed a bill that also allowed police and firefighters to retire at age 50 and pocket 90 percent of their pay in pension benefits. In 1990, there was a bill that changed how retirement benefits are calculated -- from a percentage of the last three years' salary averaged annually, to the last year's pay only, which savvy employees could inflate with overtime and unused sick leave.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Again
The pillage of the public coffers by the public employee unions is legendary in New York and CA and NJ and MA and ILL. Disability pensions are just a way to further screw the taxpayer. In NYC, Ray Kelly, the current police commissioner, retired about 10 years ago on a disability pension from a supposed heart condition. That didn't stop him from helping train the Haitian police force to engage in more sophisticated forms of graft for a couple of years and he was disabled that he became PC under Bloomberg. Not that he's a bad guy and not that he hasn't done a good job this time around, but he has games the system for his own benefit. At least in CA and the western states you can have a referendum and cut these thieves of at the knees. In NY there is no ability for the public to put a referendum on the ballot. Unfortunately it will take a financial calamity for these moronic thieving politicians to change the corrupt system.
In NY there is no ability for the public to put a referendum on the ballot.
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One of the reasons Hitlery wanted to play in New York -- the Clintoons do not like ANY competition against their criminal Marxist ways.
How does that saying go? Democracy works until the masses figure out they can vote to raid the coffers...
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