Posted on 12/28/2004 5:47:59 PM PST by NormsRevenge
No single act or piece of legislation by itself created the pension crisis that threatens to overwhelm the state and many local governments in California. The pension mess stems from a series of bad decisions, of fiscally reckless votes (many of them self-serving) in the Legislature, in city councils and county boards of supervisors.
Still, in the state's downward spiral into a deep hole of pension debt, the passage of SB 2465 more than a decade ago stands out. On the last night of the 1990 legislative session, the innocuous contents of SB 2465 were gutted on the Assembly floor and new provisions added that changed state retirement rules to allow pension benefits to be based on an employee's highest annual salary rather than the average of the last three years of employment.
Without benefit of a committee hearing or any serious public analysis, the Assembly passed the bill at 2:45 a.m. on a 71 to 1 vote. (Then-Assemblyman and now Sen. Tom McClintock, R-Thousand Oaks, cast the only no vote.) The state Senate approved it later that morning 37 to 0, and Gov. George Deukmejian signed it 20 days later.
At the time the bill passed, the one-year pension formula was projected to cost an additional $63 million a year. Costs have ballooned to more than $100 million annually since then, just part of the reason state pension costs are expected to triple from $1.2 billion in 2002-03 to $3.3 billion by 2009-10.
SB 2465 was a bad deal for the public and taxpayers in every way. Beyond extra costs, the new law created financial incentives for experienced managers to leave government service early, often at the peak of their careers when their skills and services were most needed.
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
To attempt to lay it on the Duke's doorstep is most ingenuous. If you want to go back to find root causes, try the Myer-Milius-Brown Act of 1972 which gave bargaining rights to public unions. Unlike in the private sector, the unions are the more powerful party, since no politician (other than Dave McClintoc) has been found who can stand up to the prospect of a public sector strike with its concomittant suspension of public services. Every area of public employment which has public employee unions should be outsourced to the private sector....
McClintock has apparently been on the side of economic reason and caution for years but he's never quite good enough for the anointed moderates. Well, the moderates are about to sink into the economic morass with their Austrian pretender at the helm and they are still blaming the conservatives for their continuing troubles.
It's in the cool aid.
This whole pension thing makes my blood boil. I'm leaving California in a few months and never looking back. Paradise has become too corrupt.
Tom was the only one who cared that the obvious would happen? That retiring government drones would routinely be given exorbitant final year salary boosts so that their pensions would go way up? Freakin' duh.
Figures. He must have done something radical, like reading the bill.
Deukmejian had no excuse.
One of life's bitter little ironies.
He's was irrelevant back then to many in the party leadership, yaknow. Now, they can't sling the mud quick enough to cover up his very existence.
Young upstarts didn't go over well in the GOP, for some reason. McCarthy may be another one in the making.
marking
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