I can't understand the Dems walked away from it
Pennsylvania taxpayers gave $843 million this year to the two public-sector pension systems -- Public School Employees's Retirement System (PSERS) and State Employees Retirement System (SERS) -- that serve more than 675,000 current and retired state government and public school employees.
That contribution will increase to $5.8 billion within two years, according to Commonwealth Foundation.
Sorry, this is not good news for either the Republicans or the teachers.
What this action will do is to ensure Bob Casey’s re-election in 2012. Republicans should be demanding that the House return and vote this session, then a challenger would have a shot.
There are 675,000 people affected by this action, the majority (probably 400,000) outside of Philly and Pittsburgh vote conservatively. All of these people have paid 7.5% of their salary over the last decade into their retirement. Over the same amount of time the state and school districts have paid in less than an average of 1% per year and in conjunction with the fall in the stock market, the pension fund is under-funded.
It’s one thing if the stock market tanks... it’s another if the deposits were never made. PA wants to move to a “401K” defined contribution plan - why? The state/districts didn’t match contributions when it was a defined benefit plan. Imagine that your company refused to make matching contributions to your 401K - think you’d be buying their stock?
OK, so we have a new governor that is going to follow Gov. Crist’s lead from NJ and start cutting the “public dole.” In spite of the bipartisan agreement to fix the pension plan (233-14 across the House and Senate)the newly elected (partisan) House and Senate will follow the Governor and royally piss off 400,000 conservative teachers by changing their retirement due to inaction by the state.
Yeah - I can understand the Dems walking away from a bipartisan solution to the mess if they can blame it on the Republicans and get Casey re-elected. Check the numbers again between Toomey and Sestak...
What I don’t understand is that supposed conservatives think that this is good news.
Great stuff. It will never happen in California.....