Posted on 07/05/2007 11:51:15 AM PDT by george76
In San Francisco's effort to pay the soaring cost for retiree health benefits, it's $500,000 down, $4.9 billion to go.
The city, like most local governments and school districts in California, has put aside no money to cover the fast-growing cost of delivering on health care coverage promised to its workers once they hit retirement age.
But in San Francisco, the financial liability hanging over the city is one of the heaviest in the state, thanks in part to the generosity of its employee health care benefits.
"As this number keeps growing ... it can cripple our budget,'' said Supervisor Sean Elsbernd, who has taken the lead on trying to address the issue in the city's legislative body. "This will eat up all our discretionary income, the money we use for street repairs, parks and programs for the people of San Francisco.''
Elsbernd has worked with Mayor Gavin Newsom...
The $4.9 billion unfunded liability confronting San Francisco, California's only combined city-county, is bigger than that the city of Los Angeles ($3.2 billion), San Diego County ($1.38 billion) and San Mateo County ($469 million). But it trails the state of California at $48 billion, Los Angeles County at $16 billion and Los Angeles Unified School District at $10 billion in costs.
Now, however, governments across the country are being forced to acknowledge the approaching financial tsunamis. Beginning this fiscal year, a little-known agency, the Government Accounting Standards Board, will require them to at least spell out the amount of unfunded future health care benefits in their budgets.
"The $500,000 is a drop in the bucket to address the problem of our unfunded liability,'' said Phil Ginsburg, Newsom's chief of staff.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
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Grasshoppers. Ants.
They should just give them fair warning and whack retirement heathcare geez onbe is eligible for medicare at 65. It is their option to either stay working or pay their own healthcare. That’s real life. I say this as a wife of a government employee.
If the 4.9B liability were a gallon bucket, 500K would be a third of a milliliter.
I sense a tsunami building for a federal bailout.
So I guess funding weenie replacements wasn’t such a good idea?
Note to liberals in SF (& elsewhere): The bills must be paid eventually by somebody................today is eventually....
No kidding. Guess who get's to pay for this? It most certainly will NOT be the wack-jobs in San Fran.
What?
Tea. Party.
What an odd place to put an apostrophe.
Then who will bail us out ?
Replacements??? Additions and removals. But I quibble.
The city also pays homeless people $500/month to live there.
For some reason they can't quite figure out why they have a homeless problem...
They consider street repairs as “discretionary income”?
I have often thought that politicians are poor stewards of the public infastructure, always cutting maintenance first so they can still fund their more “public” programs (diversity, ribbon cutting, etc). This seems to confirm it.
What do you think national health care is really all about? Like social security, it’s about using yet another Ponzi scheme to shift the burden away from people who should really be responsible for taking of themselves, and putting it on the “collective whole.”
It’s about keeping power by taking away your responsibility to be personally responsible. In exchange for being responsible for yourself, you have to be responsible to the power.
The Senator Reid's undocumented Americans.
Alternatively, it's the equivalent of paying fifty cents on a debt of $4900.
On a person-for-person basis, each New Yorker is on the hook for $363 of unfunded pension liabilities, and each San Franciscan is on the hook for $6,533 - a factor of 18.
The sooner they go broke the better. I can’t wait until the chickens come home to roost for these socialist assholes and the taxes go confiscatory.
LOL. At any given time in SF, there are probably as many people with peni who wished they didn't have them as there are those without who wish they did.
I propose a barter/transplant system that could save the city millions.
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