Replies

“The “deferred compensation” is money paid by the taxpayers. It is a complete “bennie” (benefit).”

The gov’t worker, be it federal or state, is paid totally by the taxpayers to do specific jobs that help fed or state gov’ts accomplish certain work obligations. Whether money is physically set aside as “deferred compensation” or not is a rather useless discussion. Either you pay the worker upfront and he/she in turn then pays x amount of dollars into their pension funds themselves, or it is part of a negotiated package upon hiring that states one will get paid x amount in salary, but x amount of that salary will be paid directly into a pension fund by the employers rather than the employees. Both ways, the money is all taxpayer funded for public servants to be hired to do specific jobs. Its a question of semantics that is pointless to argue about, as the money source is the same.

Public jobs are funded by taxpayers, period. And we expect those public employees to do specific work to earn their pay. Their jobs are legitimate, necessary for the most part, and are jobs that those in the private sector for the most part chose not to do themselves, expecting the public sector to handle them. At any time, we the people can choose to elect officials who will determine which jobs should be handled by public employees and which jobs should be left up to the private sector. And if we don’t like the choices being made, we elect new officials with a different philosophy. For the most part in our history the division of labor has worked itself out fairly well.

For many years you made more money in the private sector, but took more risk; you made less in public sector jobs, but had more security (pension benefits were more assured). Now the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, and the taxpayers believe it has swung too far in the public sector’s favor. Time for a course correction. However, be careful not to blame the public workers themselves or color them all as lazy mooches. This is not true, and many of you have public workers in your own families who are fine public servants.

It is time to renegotiate pay/benefits for public workers to correct some of the excesses; however, the public worker is not to be blamed for the contractual obligations they took on, along with the pay/benefits that went with these public jobs. A deal is a deal. And it is not the public sector’s fault if their elected public officials, be it state or fed gov’t, then took their pension funds and spent it up on other services rather than fully funding their employees’ pension funds. That has been unconscionable, and too many of our public officials have been morally bankrupt themselves to have done this. And of course Unions have had a hand in this fiasco to boot by greedily strong arming elected officials for more and more benefits that couldn’t in the long run be sustained financially.

What has been really bothering me is how cavalier many conservatives have been about saying that contractual obligations can be broken when it comes to public employees’ jobs, when that has always been a sacred cow both in our Constitution and in all of our business dealings in the private and public sector. When Obama broke contractual obligations with the takeover of GM, conservatives went nuts. Now, it appears, too many conservatives are willing to do the same with contract obligations when they are part of public sector jobs. You don’t break contracts, unless in a bankruptcy proceeding as determined by a bankruptcy judge, and states themselves cannot declare bankruptcy for many good reasons. Also, many states protect public retirement benefits of their employees in their state Constitutions and therefore the contract terms for their states’ public employees cannot be changed even if one wanted to attempt it. Dinking with contracts is a bad precedent to set under any circumstances.

So, now money is short, changes must be made, but it will serve no useful purpose to demonize public workers as if they are mere slaves to the private sector rather than just fellow workers trying to raise and feed their families. Equally, it is time for public sector workers to stop being excessively greedy regarding pay and benefits during bad times, knowing that it is their fellow private workers who are footing the bill.

Another thing, a lot of the private workers are also making a good buck, such as bankers, wall street traders, hedge fund operators, wealthy financiers, corporate workers, etc. It isn’t all a bunch of poor private sector workers being forced to fund public sector jobs. I’m just getting disgusted at everyone fighting everyone else over the almighty dollar now that we have hit hard times. Greedy banks raising fees on everything that moves, greedy oil speculators, greedy Unions, greedy and corrupt elected gov’t officials, greedy credit card companies, bah humbug.

The one thing that would help us a whole lot will be when we can dump Obama and his socialistic minions from public office and get some fiscally conservative elected officials in there instead. Then we can get our fiscal house back in order, and hopefully the economy will rebound from the financial depths we are now wallowing in. The unknown factor that always lurks in the background is what happens on the world stage to throw a monkey wrench into the works. And having a weak leader (and I use the word “leader” loosely) doesn’t help at all in this international arena. We must defeat Obama in 2012, we must.