Carbon Taxes & Public Sector Pensions

EcoWorld ^ | 3/4/2009 | Ed Ring

[Pru]

http://ecoworld.com/blog/2009/03/04/carbon-taxes-public-sector-pensions/

[Lockbox]

good find

[rightinthemiddle]

From the article:

While interacting with these lobbyists and public relations professionals, I ventured a theory that was met initially with skepticism, and later with growing acceptance. I suggested that the biggest source of looming government deficits was the underfunded pensions for public employees, and since public employee unions control our state and local governments, of course they will welcome any law that allows “fees” to be imposed to mitigate global warming, since the scale of these “fees” is estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and nothing else can hope to eliminate deficits and make their pension funds solvent.

This is the reason we discuss the issue of public sector reform in this green publication. Global warming payments that flow from the private sector into the public sector - via taxes, fees, and sale of emissions allowances, are the biggest way public sector entities may avoid bankruptcies and drastic roll-backs of their benefit packages, which now exceed that of average private sector workers by a factor of 2-4x.

Could this be why everyone in the public sector, including the teachers who are diligently giving our children diluvian nightmares, have completely embraced the global warming panic? Could it be they’re just trying to protect their retirements?

[rightinthemiddle]

Government employees (teachers) embracing and pushing the “hoax” which will help ensure their cushy retirements?

Say it ain’t so...

[DrC]

It’s a great find and almost surely the explanation for Obama’s enthusiasm for cap-and-trade and the hundreds of billions of dollars it will generate every year. This will be one of the most regressive taxes imaginable, but of course Obama will never call it a tax.

He’s going to do the same with health care: it will be partially financed through mandates on individuals or employers. Obama will never call these taxes, which is the only way he can say with a straight face that he is cutting taxes for 95% of Americans. It should be obvious to anyone with a brain that one can’t raise government expenditures from below 20% of GDP to above 22% of GDP on a permanent basis without everyone paying more in taxes.

[CPT Clay]

Good read

[steelyourfaith]

 

Beam me to Planet Gore !

[Lockbox]

read

www.pnhp.org/mass_report/mass_report_Final.pdf

[CPT Clay]

The solution: Unions in the public sector must be strictly regulated. They must be banned from participating in political activity, for starters. And from now on, public sector employees can get social security and medicare just like the American citizens they supposedly serve. If not completely liquidated, public employee pension funds should be phased out, existing only to fulfill some realistically scaled back obligation to existing public sector retirees or those nearing retirement.