Posted on 12/14/2016 8:01:52 AM PST by SeekAndFind
When Detroit filed for bankruptcy in 2013, the city’s emergency-financial team said that high levels of retirement debt could prevent them from rescuing the Motor City’s finances. Detroit had been in economic decline for decades, and the pension problem—including billions of dollars in bonuses handed out while the city was hurtling toward insolvency—was just one part of the depressing financial picture.
Dallas, by contrast, has been one of the fastest-growing American cities in recent years. Becoming a magnet for investment and opportunity, however, hasn’t protected the Texas city from experiencing its own Detroit-style financial crisis.
Dallas’s retirement system for cops and firefighters combines many of the features that have nearly sunk state and local pension plans around the country. Things got so dire over the summer that retirees began pulling their money out of the system. It’s the first run on a government pension plan in recent memory.
Dallas created the police and fire plan in 1916. The system’s trustees eventually persuaded the state legislature to allow employees and pensioners to run the plan. Not surprisingly, the members have done so for their own benefit and sent the tab for unfunded promises—now estimated at perhaps $5 billion—to taxpayers.
Among the features of the system is an annual, 4 percent cost-of-living adjustment that far exceeds the actual increase in inflation since 1989, when it was instituted. A Dallas employee with a $2,000 monthly pension in 1989 would receive $3,900 today if the system’s annual increases were pegged to the consumer price index. Under the generous Dallas formula, however, that same monthly pension could be worth more than $5,000. No wonder the ship is sinking. The system also features a lavish deferment option that lets employees collect pensions even as they continue to work and earn a salary.
(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org:8080 ...
Pay close attention.
This is coming to a city and state near you.
The people most responsible set this course in the sixties and seventies. Many of them are dead.
The people who set them on it, yes. The people who’ve continued to enable it are still around, and that includes pensioners who were content to be conned.
Which is always the case when it comes to the ruling class i.e. legislators in "public service."
Pension funds should never be run for the profit of those that control them.
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Across the country these plans are set up with unrealistic goals and expectations... cronyism would destroy the plan even if it was healthy... I’d love to run one of these plans if it had realistic expectations and I had autonomy to invest like a hedgie.
They raise the pension return to 8% which is not possible to archive year after year. California and other states did the same. Someone was being bribed. California has the taxpayers on the hook if the gov’t workers do not get they very high pension checks.
The City may even be Dem. Anyone know offhand?
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Large cities everywhere are cesspools for liberals and democrats. Look at any election map of the country showing counties and you’ll see that it’s the cities versus the rural areas.
RATs raid and feed on the public fisc more ravenously than their name sakes do at grain storage facilities. What they don’t consume they leave damaged or dirtied.
Yes, Dallas is dominated by Democrats. The Republicans all moved out to the suburbs.
They should jail the politicias who set this up.
If you set up a pension in your business the way the government does, you would actually go to jail for it.
They take money from you for your pension, but instead of putting it onto a bank account for the future they spend it now- then promise to pay you out of the money that comes in when you retire.
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that’s not what happened...the pensions are just too lavish for the system.
police and firemen should not be able to retire at 50 years old.
Firemen should not have the same benefits as policemen...the two jobs are different as night and day...
one has to beg people to apply and one has to beat people with a stick they have so many wanting to join
one will get you killed almost any day and the other wait on fires (almost always small kitchen fires) that are fewer and fewer every year
Same mindset - same party - same types of excuses and corruptions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_County,_Texas
(November 2014), the major elected officials are[10]
Position Name Party
County Judge Clay Jenkins Democratic
Commissioner, Precinct 1 Theresa Daniel Democratic
Commissioner, Precinct 2 Mike Cantrell Republican
Commissioner, Precinct 3 John Wiley Price Democratic
Commissioner, Precinct 4 Elba Garcia Democratic
District Attorney Susan Hawk Republican
District Clerk Felicia Pitre Democratic
County Clerk John Warren Democratic
Sheriff Lupe Valdez Democratic
99 Dallas police officers have quit in the past 10 weeks and there are only 30 in the new training class.
$5k/mo and 4% cost of living increase. Whew. Wish the state would do half that.
Any time you have access to “other people’s money” (e.g. the taxpayers’ funds), it is far too easy to spend that money. A prime example of the ills of socialism on display. This situation is playing out across this country with private and public pension funds in dire straits.
All of these types of pensions should be done away with and replaced by 401k type pensions. The employer can kick in 5%, and the employees can contribute whatever they want, just like those of us in the private sector. This free lunch crap needs to stop. Yesterday.
Atlanta works like that, too. A lot of places do
According to your numbers, Dallas is in California. The rest of the Metroplex should send them packing.
Had she remained a Dem, none of the media would have noticed.
Mental health problems are no game, but she seemed to abuse the system, me thinks. No way to tell by what has been reported.
Every countywide elected official in Dallas County is a Democrat. (Although Dallas City doesn’t take up all the county, but conversely extends into 4 other counties.) The City of Dallas is heavily Democrat, although the shots are called by the “Citizen’s Council” made up of powerful, unelected, rich Republicans and Democrats and their lackeys.
Not to worry. Today, they approved a 25% increase in salaries phased in over (5?) years.
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