Posted on 03/10/2010 5:37:53 AM PST by rhema
Hundreds of University of California students rallied against a 32% tuition hike last week. Let's hope their future employers get a better work product. With just a little research, the students could have discovered that compensation packages won from the state by unions were a big reason for the hike.
Last year, the state cut funding to the 10-campus system to $2.6 billion from $3.25 billion. To make up for the reduction in state funding, the UC Board of Regents increased tuition to $10,300, about triple 1999's cost.
Understandably, students have gone wild. The UC system is supposed to offer low- and middle-income students a cheaper alternative to a private college education. Now a year at a UC school can cost students as much as at many private schools.
Who's to blame? UC President Mark Yudof rightly notes he had no other means of closing the university's budget gap. The university used $300 million in reserves last year and cut staff salaries by furloughing them between 11 and 26 days this year. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger says "we've done everything we could, but the bottom line is it's not enough. We need to put pressure on the legislature not only this year in a year of crisis, but in the future."
The California legislature? Good luck with that. In 1999, the Democratic legislature ran a reckless gamble that makes Wall Street's bankers look cautious. At the top of a bull market, they assumed their investment returns would grow at a 8.25% rate in perpetuity—equivalent to assuming that the Dow would reach 25,000 by 2009—and enacted a huge pension boon for public-safety and industrial unions.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Ah, the youth of today,
When will students figure out the politicians have sold them out?
When they’re about 35-40, married, and trying to raise some kids...
What is it with the legislature? Do they not understand basic arithmetic or logic? It is impossible to cut the pie so that everyone gets a bigger slice.
Yes, the good youths of today. They’re all for making people pay for everyone else’s healthcare, housing etc.. except when it comes to paying more for their education. Then they put their foot down. Like good lefties, everyone should pay for the poor and unfortunate, except for me.
Note: This is not meant to disparage all the hardworking youths of today. There are plenty of them. Its just that like every generation, theres a sizeable left wing tilt to the generation until they get older, grow up and have to pay taxes....
"So far, so good. So far, so good. So..."
BTW, California has the HIGHEST PER-CAPITA CANNABIS CONSUMPTION IN THE WORLD ! ! !
Young people are rebellious by nature. Someone should expose them to the intellectual challenge found in The Federalist Papers and in our Constitution. They would probably love it.
Young Republican chapters are being founded and are growing on some campuses. It’s a start.
My thoughts EXACTLY. A point in their lives when they have a LOT at stake, and it's painful / impossible to change course.
It doesn’t even take that long, if they half a brain. My son is 25, went to college and currently lives and works in CA. While at school, he was ridiculed and physically abused for his conservative principles. His car was vandalized with Commie slogans. Typical college fun!
Now that several of his friends have been working a couple of years, they want to know why they don’t take home more of their pay. Ha!
On the other hand, he has friends still in grad or med school who are still as delusional now as when they were in college.
The difference is this latter group simply hasn’t started drawing paychecks yet, so they can still keep their heads in the ground.
My son actually feels bad for the ones in med school. He went to dinner with one a few weeks ago and asked her how she felt spending all this time and money to become a doctor with the end result going to be she would become an employee of the government. She had no idea what he was talking about. No clue about the health care bill’s ramifications on doctors. I wonder if the med schools are purposefully ignoring mentioning any of that to their students.
Once they start working, they like my son’s other friends who already have, will find out soon enough.
Considering how many of them are planning their educations to become future bureaucrats because it is the only career they can see with a "secure future," they might consider the compensation increase a further inducement. Meanwhile, what they're learning how to callously stick it to the taxpayer in grand style.
Let's hope that future editorial writers think a little more carefully.
When they’re about 35-40, married, and trying to raise some kids...
Exactly! (Certainly the way it happened to me.)
Let California serve as a cautionary tale for what looms for America if we decide to emulate Greece and France. Funding runs out and people turn out in the streets to protest, rather than questioning the spending. When something needs to be cut, the meat goes first and the fat remains.
the progressives-liberals-democrats have dumbed down education.
i took a community college finance class, and was amazed at how easy it was.
i could have passed this class in 5th grade.
one minority student told me that he’d flunked both midterm and final,
but got a “b” grade based upon his class participation.
I go to UCLA’s night school and know of someone who could not afford to go to even UC schools. He later went to school to one of the local schools which were more hands on in their tech courses and got the job eventually. His boss later told him that the UC schools were not hands on in their approach and his eyes rolled when the interviewees could not define any of the curiculum subjects that were sure to be part of the job.
Despite budget cuts and layoff warnings, California still hiring and workforce still growing
http://www.sacbee.com/politics/story/2094403.html
The Sacramento Bee
Aug. 9, 2009
State job number on upswing despite recession
By George Avalos
California’s state government has managed to add thousands of jobs
during this past year, defying a mammoth budget deficit and a brutal
recession.
The job growth for state workers contrasts with the loss of 759,000
jobs in California’s private industry in the past 12 months:
http://www.mercurynews.com/topstories/ci_12984385?nclick_check=1&forced=true
not to mention gubermint employees and their pensions...
Reform advocates are spotlighting those with extravagant pensions
— $100,000 or more — as a way to get the public’s attention and
emphasize that the current system is unsustainable.
http://www.modbee.com/editorials/story/803636.html
Perhaps the real reason why public-sector pension costs have not been tackled is that the full bill has never been revealed to taxpayers.
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13988606
From The Economist print edition
July 9, 2009
EDITORIAL
Dodging the bill-The great public-sector pension rip-off
JOIN a private-sector company these days and you will be very lucky if you get a pension linked to your final salary. In Britain almost three out of four companies that retain such schemes have closed them to new employees. The cost of paying such benefits, which are partly linked to inflation and offer payouts to surviving spouses, is simply too high now that many retirees are surviving into their 80s.
Yet most new public-sector employees in Britain and America continue to benefit from pensions linked to their salaries. The pension costs facing the public sector are roughly the same as those facing the private sector; their employees are likely to live just as long. But because of the presumed largesse of future taxpayers, governments seem under much less pressure to reduce their pension costs. In 2005 a reform package in Britain raised the retirement age for new state employees, but still left existing employees able to retire at 60.
Private sector can’t afford public sector employees
The Government Accounting Standards Board
instituted what is known as GASB 45, a reporting system requiring
cities, towns, states and other political entities to disclose
liabilities associated with other than pension post-employment
benefits (OPEB). This should be fully implemented by the end of the
2009 fiscal year.
This increased transparency will disclose an unbelievable $1.5
trillion in just unfunded health care obligations!
And that’s not all. USA Today reports that “The federal government
has unfunded obligations of $1.2 trillion to pay for retired health
care for retired federal workers ... and Medicare and Social
Security obligations pushing the total to more than $5 trillion.”
What happened to the good old days when a billion dollars was a lot
of money? Sooner or later taxpayers are going to wake up and things will get nasty.
This taxpayer backlash will not be entirely politically motivated.
Not all Democrats have government jobs. An overwhelming majority of
state, local and federal employees are Democrats, who, if legally
permitted, belong to public sector unions - a massive voting bloc of
22.5 million, including retirees. The federal government is the
nation’s largest single employer, even excluding the Postal Service.
And state and local governments employ more people than any other
sector of our economy.
It is no mystery the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports
74 percent of budget gaps are in blue states! And Florida is counted
as red, which is debatable after Obama’s ascension in 2008. New York
has a $13 billion budget deficit, a mere bagatelle compared to
California at $42 billion. The similarities between General Motors,
New York and California are striking: None can afford its employees.
The moral of this story is: If the private sector were forced to pay
these same salaries and benefits, we would have exported all our
jobs by now - along with all the companies that provide these jobs.
A good starting point to cure retirement benefit underfunding would
be to slowly shrink the size of our governments by taking attrition.
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