CT Proposes Pension Wealth Confiscation

Politics

This is How States Will Take Your Pension

All emphasis ours

with contributions and profanity by Vince Lanci of Echobay.com

UPDATE: '[CT] Pension Reform Is Not Theft'- A Rebuttal (after the introduction)

Are you watching closely CT, IL, NJ etc?

The table is now set for you to have your pension violated for the greater good. Are you paying attention? Someone is deciding that you must decrease your standard of living on behalf of someone else because the state of CT in its infinite ignorance messed up.

Will this proposal go thru? Probably not. But this is just the first salvo. Government bureaucrats always seek to make nice with everyone. Therefore a "compromise will follow. Leaders will eb worn down, and something will get thru. Start by calling your congressman or the people in this paper

Governor Malloy let GE leave. Well, that means you, the citizen will have to take a pension cut. Not Ray Dalio who took a payoff to stick around.

You, the naive, believing in rainbow farting unicorn, Benetton wearing, Elitist, multiculturalist, asswipe (with no concept of limited resources) are telling the last 5 middle class working people left in CT that they must accept a breached contract.

And it is you who are destroying this country as well as the EU nations that have enriched themselves on the backs of the middle class. The rich get richer while the poor are taken care of by the tax paying middle class. Fuck you and your flowery false rhetoric.

Avoiding the vulgate, here it is in words our academic yet supremely idiotic world leaders can understand:The corporatist version of our capitalist system has exploited the bourgeoisie middle class system to the point of destroying them. The capitalistic pyramid shaped society we learned of in school is now in reality shaped like an hourglass.The wealthy are up top. While their numbers may not be as big as the poor, their influence is far bigger. Their size represents the accumulated assets, The poor are below. While it is easy to connect the optic of size to numbers of poor, it would be more accurate to describe the bottom of the hourglass as the negative of the top in terms of assets. Or if you prefer, it represents need.

So the top of the hourglass represents the weighted value of those who "have".
The bottom half is weighted according to those who "need".

What does the stem in the middle represent? It represents the shrinking middle class. It represents those left with little upward mobility who are increasingly in danger of slipping down into poverty. They are the taken for granted backbone of capitalism.The only thing keeping the system together is that ever narrowing middle class. And when the middle class is wiped out, that hourglass will break.It will break because of retiring boomers and limited resources here. It will break in the EU from increased competition from immigrants for resources coupled with the rule of law being abdicated.

There is one increasingly possible way it can be prevented from breaking. And it is scary. it is totalitarianism. So one way or another the United Colors of Benetton are burning down.

For now, lets focus on CT 's red herring to take your pension from you.

What they should really be calling this is "Sorry, We messed up, and you aren't getting paid what you thought". Here's our title: Systems before Pensioners or How The Real Revolution in Government will Start

UPDATE: A Rebuttal to the above Editorial
'[CT] Pension Reform Is Not Theft'- A Rebuttal

Original Article in Question

Yankee Institute proposes reforms that put people before pensions

Zachary Janowski

For Immediate Release: 2/22/2016Contact: Zachary JanowskiMobile: (860) 384-5777Email: Zach@YankeeInstitute.org

Yankee Institute proposes reforms that put people before pensionsSolutions can save hundreds of millions over the next two years

Feb. 22 – Lawmakers can change the future of Connecticut by putting people before pensions. Right now, people in our state suffer because we put pensions first.Families suffer when loved ones don’t receive care. Those cuts happen, in large part, because we budget for pensions before people and then decide how many services we can afford. [ Edit-who receives those pensions, llamas?- Soren]Younger state workers lose their jobs because the unions that supposedly represent them put pensions before people. [Edit- yes its always the unions, and not your inability to create a budget and retain businesses- Soren]Commuters lose time with their families in unnecessary and potentially hazardous traffic because we put pensions before people – spending $2 on pensions for every $1 we spend on transportation. [Edit- pensions cause traffic jams. Worse, proper traffic lights are impossible because of a contract you signed and now want to dishonor- Soren]To address this vexing problem, the Yankee Institute commissioned Securing Our Future: A Menu of Solutions to Connecticut’s Pension Crisis. Backed by a full actuarial model of the State Employee Retirement System, this report outlines options for putting people before pensions and getting Connecticut out of a repeated cycle of deficits. [Edit- do you know why it is a link and actual numbers aren't included? Because you'd shit if you saw what they want to do -Soren]

[Edit-Here is page 3 of the document hidden behind the link- Soren]

The report was written by Anthony Randazzo and Daniel Takash from the Reason Foundation’s Pension Integrity Project and Adam Rich, a Fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society and resident of South Windsor.

[Follow our work on pension reform at YankeeInstitute.org/PensionReform]Pension reform will have an immediate impact on the people of Connecticut. Over the next two years, Connecticut faces deficits of more than $3 billion. Pension reform could save hundreds of millions of dollars over the next two years. It could mean the difference between services continuing rather than being cut, and alleviate the need for yet more tax increases that will hurt homeowners across the state.If even a few of the reforms in this paper were enacted, [Edit- they are already haggling, see?- Soren] the state could save hundreds of millions of dollars a year in payments to our pension system, and almost $9 billion over the next 30 years. One reform alone – bringing employee contributions up to the national average level of 6 percent – would save $290 million over the next two years.“For too long, Connecticut has put pensions before people.[Edit- don't you mean Pensioners before Corrupt Politicians?- Soren] It is time we rethought our priorities so that people come first,” said Carol Platt Liebau, president of the Yankee Institute. “We can prevent a great deal of suffering across our state if we put people before pensions.”“We have to decide whether retirement benefits for future state workers are more important than people who are actually suffering today,” Liebau said.“Lawmakers recently refinanced Connecticut’s pension payments. It’s a bit like refinancing the mortgage on a house you can’t afford,” said Suzanne Bates, policy director for the Yankee Institute. “Not a bad first step, but you still need to sell the house.”The potential solutions in the paper include changes to the governance of SERS; changes to existing benefits that would require approval from state employee unions; and changes to benefits for future workers which could be set in statute by lawmakers.The proposed reforms will help Connecticut meet a range of goals.

Fair. Right now, non-government workers in Connecticut pay extra taxes to support state worker pensions of which they could only dream. This unfair system hurts people at all income levels simply because they don’t work for government.
Affordable. Since 2001, pension costs have grown faster than government spending or tax revenue, meaning that other spending priorities have received less funding. Unaffordable pensions mean less care for the disabled, worse road conditions and higher taxes. Unfunded pension promises loom over families and employers as future tax increases when they make decisions about where to live and locate.
Stable and transparent. Connecticut has an obligation to keep its retirement promises to current and retired state employees. Modifying future promises is one way to increase the likelihood that existing promises are kept. The recent SEBAC agreement refinanced pension costs to avoid large planned spikes in the future. The agreement did not address unplanned uncertainty. Current projections assume pension fund investments will earn 6.9 percent every year. If returns fall a little short and reach an average of 6 percent (which is higher than recent returns), pension costs in 2040 will go up by 30 percent.The current pension system is not transparent. It is impossible to know how much it will cost to pay a state employee’s pension until that employee – or his or her spouse – die, long after he or she stopped working. This lack of clarity makes it difficult to budget. Under the current system, decisions made today will ripple through state finances for decades.Connecticut pensions appear similar in overall cost compared to other state systems, but two things make them different. Typically, these comparisons are done relative to payroll. Connecticut state employees tend to earn more than employees of other states, which makes a pension worth the same percent of pay even more valuable. (For example, the average state employee salary here is $10,000 higher than the average salary in Massachusetts, and $5,000 higher than the average in New York.) The second issue is that although the cost as a percentage of payroll is similar to other states, the costs are shared very differently in Connecticut. The most a non-hazardous state employee contributes is 2 percent of payroll. The national average is 6 percent.

Securing Our Future builds on past Yankee Institute projects including Born Broke (2014) on the enormity of Connecticut’s unfunded pension promises and Unequal Pay (2015), which showed Connecticut state employees earn at least 25 percent more than non-government workers with the same skills and experience. In the past six months, Yankee Institute videos on these topics were viewed more than 400,000 times.

The Hartford-based Yankee Institute for Public Policy works to transform Connecticut into a place where everyone is free to succeed.

Here is the "Reform" Plan that they couldn't bring themselves to include in their announcement today.

h/t Brian Johnson

Where is the Piranha when you need him?