7.0% annually
Posted on 11/07/2019 9:35:53 AM PST by MarvinStinson
Nearly 80,000 Californians collected six-figure taxpayer-funded pensions in 2018, as retirement costs leave half the state's cities at "high risk" of serious financial distress, according to an analysis.
Transparent California, a free-market think tank, found that 6 percent of retired government workers collected more than $100,000 in 2018, an 85 percent jump since 2013. Those payouts represented 20 percent of the $51.7 billion in total pension payments. Taxpayers spent a record-high $40 billion to cover the costs of public sector retirees in 2018, the report also found.
The median household income in California is $75,277. The six-figure payouts propel thousands of retirees into the top 38 percent of all earners in the state, according to census data. About 1.2 million people received pension checks in 2018, including a retired deputy police chief who collected nearly $1.5 million in 2018.
The increasing costs could push residents to a "breaking point," according to Robert Fellner, executive director of Transparent California. Local and state government agencies will have to raise taxes to cover costs or cut public services to pay people who are no longer working.
"You keep raising your sales tax [to fund pensions], you are obviously pushing residents to a breaking point," Fellner told the Washington Free Beacon. "The public services speaks for itself. You see the homelessness and stuff going on, and it's a really bad situation."
California has long struggled to contain its spiraling pension costs. In 2011, the Little Hoover Commission, the state's bipartisan government watchdog, urged California to drastically reduce its pension commitments. Then-governor Jerry Brown, a Democrat, pushed to adopt pension reform, but labor leaders killed the effort with the help of former attorney general Kamala Harris, now a 2020 presidential hopeful.
"California's pension plans are dangerously underfunded, the result of overly generous benefit promises, wishful thinking and an unwillingness to plan prudently," the commission report said. "Unless aggressive reforms are implemented now, the problem will get far worse, forcing counties and cities to severely reduce services and layoff employees to meet pension obligations."
California's public pension cost continues to eat up the budgets of local governments. A state auditor report found that 47 percent of Californian cities are at "high risk" of financial distress due to pension costs. The wide-sweeping audit found that "increasing pension costs may supplant a city’s other spending priorities and potentially cause it to curtail critical services."
Some cities, however, dispute the auditor's findings. The city manager of Marysville, the most financially risky city in the state, told the Appeal-Democrat the auditor's remarks were "damaging and outdated."
Fellner said that the bloated California public pension scheme is a "textbook argument for limited government" and urged reform.
"The majority [of cities] will keep raising taxes and cutting services," Fellner said. "But some of the cities can't afford it. California has already seen some cities go bankrupt."
Stupidity has a cost.
Both ways of course.
California needs to be allowed to fail. It’s too big to prop up.
On the other hand, it has been pointed out since 5he nineteen sixties that public pensions had become a ponzi scheme. Growing up I read long articles full of forcasts written to take in life expectancy forecasts and future housing costs and according to many accountants of the time collapse would come just after the turn of the century. We’ve made it almost two decades into the twenty first century but when States and city governments collapse those pensions are going bye bye.
Nobody didn’t know that this was going to happen.
They just hoped to get in and get out and have a nice retirement before the fall.
One of the brightest observers of America’s descent to the Third World status sought by the power-mad Democrat leftists (but I repeat myself) & too many self-serving Chamber of Commerce RINOs describes what’s ahead for all of us if we fail to halt the process. I URGE you to read and share it.
Here’s the link: https://nicholasstixuncensored.blogspot.com/2012/08/victor-davis-hanson-anarcho-tyranny-in.html
Stalin once analogized America as a healthy, vibrant man then went on to observe that to capture this country, the Marxists would need to make us sick and bring us down before we would adopt communism.
Most all on this list have been paying attention as we’ve been methodically “sickened” by devices such as Cloward-Piven and destruction of education (Common Core, etc.)
But many of those with whom I hope you’ll share this have been too busy to notice our impending ENGINEERED demise.
Two historical quotes to support his report:
“Tolerance and apathy are the last two virtues of a dying society”
Aristotle
“ A man may be personally ever so well off, and yet if his country be ruined, he must be ruined with it.”
Pericles (Thucydides), 423 BC
7.0% annually
>>This is why the Democrats win and if you are not a government employee you will pay through the nose for political jobs.
<<
With kameltoe the whore, Californians are paying for SOME sort of “job.”
Will the last one out please turn off any lights not in Newsom’s brownout areas
AND
make sure the pension checks don’t bounce
Proof Democrats are in it totally for personal gain!
Thanks for the comment. VDH is one of the best. We don’t see too many intellectuals like him come down on the RIGHT side of the fence.
Some California cities are getting out of paying by declaring bankruptcy.
This is destroying NJ as well; more and more current revenues are swallowed by these absurd promises that were made to buy votes over the past decades, and now current residents see services suffer as they line the pockets of the gubmint worker caste (”working” and retired). American workers with children leave when the last one finishes high school, and those without children leave even faster - their rents/mortgages include huge amounts to pay for a public school industry that is filled with foreign “replacement American” students.
Europeans started building NJ in 1660; now they are leaving it (and its costs) to the Asian and Latin Americans trafficked here to replace non-breeding Americans and suppress wages. Sad; it was a great place to grow up...
Teachers’ unions destroyed NJ; Chris Christie will be missed because he really dealt with them well. He limited property tax increases to 2% so that if teachers got 4% raises (while the working who paid them usually got much less) there were fewer teachers each time around. Also, during his first race the Asbury Park Press published the salaries of all NJ public school teachers, and for probably the last time in history the NJ voters elected a pro-life, anti-tax Republic to two terms as governor.
A six-figure pension for a public employee is scandalous if you didn’t fund it; while you’re looking at it from the beneficiary’s viewpoint, try explaining it to the people paying it today. Companies and employees avoid some states like the plague because of the masses of money directed at people who stopped working decades ago - and those bills divert funds from services for the current population.
There will never be any economic recovery in areas most afflicted by this, and they are already resorting to importing Third Worlders just to maintain “clients” (albeit non-paying ones) for the current government worker caste.
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