Pension Reform - the San Francisco Treat

There is a new catch phrase, and it is pension reform.  Pension reform is like tort reform, who's primary purpose it to make it harder for people injured by neglect or even deliberately faulty designs to hold businesses accountable.  Pension reform is another example of kick em when they are down.

The City and County of San Francisco will have two competing pension reform measures on the ballot, each of them trying to outdo the other on screwing city employees.  Before I describe them, let's talk a little about the bargain that city and county workers everywhere accept when they go to work.

• You will accept less pay than your counterparts in private industry.
• You will work in a bureaucracy that whose rules and working conditions will always lag those of private industry.  Change takes so long that you will always be using obsolete practices.
• You will be led by managers who's sole qualification is that they are a friend of the mayor a supervisor or the son or daughter of a somebody's big campaign contributor.  And they will never have to deal with the consequences of their decisions because:
• Every few years someone new is elected and all those managers will change, and you start all over again trying to explain to them what it is the department is supposed to do.

In exchange, you will get decent benefits and a decent pension.  The pension is a defined benefit plan, meaning that how much you will receive is based upon a formula that factors is the age at which you retire, the number of years you worked, and what you were paid while you worked.  It allows you to plan your retirement, because you can know what your income will be. 

So now that you know the terms of the bargain, let's see what our politicians have come up with.

First, they will increase how much of your salary they will take for to help cover the cost of your pension.  The more you make, the higher percentage they will take.  This could actually result in a raise reducing your take home pay.

Second, they will no longer count all of your salary when figuring your pension.  For a long time overtime has been excluded from most plans, and with good reason.  You don't want to encourage people to game the system and tack on a bunch of overtime in their last year or two of employment to goose up their pension.  But under these plans, you stop accruing benefits after a specified number of hours each year.

Third, they will modify the benefit calculations, so that the amount of your income that the pension will replace when you retire will be less.

Fourth,  there will be some cost of living adjustments for retirees, widows, and orphans that can just disappear.  If the Retirement Board and the actuaries decide there is not enough money in the trust fund to increase your pension a specified percentage, not only will they not pay it, but they will take away the cost of living adjustments they have been giving you over the years.  The adjustment is specified at 3-1/2 percent.  If there is enough money in the trust fund to pay only a 3 percent increase, they not only will not pay any increase, but they will take away all the increases from previous years.  This could be an unexpected pay cut of 10, 20 percent or more, depending upon how long you have been receiving it.

Finally, when times are hard, and the city is asking you to take unpaid time off, and pay cuts (while of course the politicians are not cutting their own pay), then they will raise the amount you must contribute to your pension.  So first they cut your pay, and then they take more of what's left.

There you have it, pension reform in a nutshell.

If the mantra were true

Over and over you here the right saying you don't raise taxes during a recession.  And on the surface, it even sounds like it might make sense.  After all, the last thing you want to do in the middle of a recession is to take money out of circulation, have people spending less.

Most of your basic necessities, you know, food, clothing, utilities, gas, those are all spent locally.  Even if most of the manufactured items were made elsewhere by slave labor, at least someone in the country is making a buck on it.

The people who's taxes they don't want to raise are the one's who are not going to spend it anyway. All of their basic needs are already covered, and most of their luxury desires are too.  They already have the boat.  And if they do spend it will not be on stuff that is going to have any impact on the US economy.

Because when you get beyond that stuff, well hiring another illegal alien to clean your toilets does not do all that much for our economy.  Nor does investing in more slave labor factories in countries with no worker protections, no safety standards, no child labor laws do much to pull us out of this.

Now contrast with their other big passion, cutting government spending.  What do you think happens when you cut government spending?  You take money away from people who are going to spend essentially all of it here in this country.  Every dollar you cut ripples through the economy many times.  So that completely belies the argument that they are doing this for the economy.

Of course there are exceptions, we could stop paying mercenaries in Afghanistan, the gold-plated benefits our elected representatives grant themselves could be cut back to something comparable to what the rest of us have to live with.  But that is not what they want to cut. They would cut meat inspectors and the FDA and other agencies whose responsibility is protecting you and your interests.

It really does come down to this.  The Republican party, and many Blue Dog Democrats, work for their corporate masters and only their corporate masters.  And they do not need the US economy to make money.  They don't need you.

What they mean by entitlements

Whenever you hear the deficit being discussed, you hear the party on the right discussing entitlement reform, or reducing entitlements.  Sadly, you also hear some of this crap coming from the lips of those who have promised to protect us.  So let's talk a little bit about what they are really talking about.

First of all, who do you think is in that room while they are negotiating what should be cut and what should not be cut.  Let me give you a hint.  There is nobody in that room that will ever need medicare or social security.  They are vested in the federal health and retirement plans in just 5 years.  These are the same plans that they would like to strip from people who do actual work. And of course there is nobody in that room with a net worth of less than a million dollars. 

So, in their viewpoint, what are entitlements?  That's easy, that is anything the government does that benefits you, that does not also benefit them.  They don't need social security or medicare.  They must be entitlements.  Unemployment benefits?   Same thing.  How about Aid to Families with Dependent Children, WIC, food stamps, college grants (or public education in any form), veterans benefits?  None that applies to them.

What you will not hear them talking about is them raising their own taxes, cutting their own salaries and benefits.  Nor will you see them cutting out the loopholes and tax giveaways that their corporate masters receive.

You don't matter.  Your role in this picture is to provide cheap labor then hurry up and die.  And they will raise the specter of welfare mothers cranking out children to increase their income or overpaid government employees (only the ones not in the room) to convince you that they are only taking food out of the mouths of the undeserving.  But of course to them, the undeserving is you.

And if you buy into that, then you deserve what you get.

Revival of the Whipping Boy

Today Rupert Murdoch revealed a little more of his belief system to the world.  The working class does not matter at all.  Two hundred people lost their jobs, while the managers who directed them walked free.  But that is how he thinks.  He will toss those people aside like so much garbage, he wants to buy Sky television.  

How much those people had anything to do with the policies that have publicly embarrassed him (for getting caught, you know he has no moral qualms what was done) is questionable.  They are not the policy makers.  But that is why they are so disposable. 

Those of you who watch and believe what you see on Fox News, that is how he thinks about you too.

If corporations are just like people

Over the years there have been supreme court decisions that have looked at corporations as having similar rights (but somehow, none of the responsibilities) of a person.  Well, perhaps we should take that to the next step.  If they are a person, perhaps they should be treated more like a person.

Interest deductions?  We get to deduct our home mortgages, so I guess it is fair that you can deduct the interest on your factories and office buildings.  And if you would like to take out a line of credit on those, well that would be deductible too.  But interest on bonds, and other sources of capital?  Well when we whip out the credit card to make purchases, or even the loan we take out to but a new car, now of that is written off our taxes, so why should it be written off yours?

Now if I own a small business, even as a sole proprietorship, I can write off the salaries and benefits and taxes I pay to and on behalf of my employees, so those would be remain legitimate deductions.  How about dividends?  Well, using the sole proprietorship model (and admittedly bending it some), any money I take out of the company is income to me, and I pay taxes, social security, all that stuff.  So dividends are just income to the owner, and the owners should pay the same taxes as any other business owner pays on income from their business.

But wouldn't that defeat the whole purpose of the corporation?  Bullshit.  The purpose of a corporation is to permit the formation of capital while limiting the liability of the investors to the money they put in.  Put another way, if you open a bar, and that bar runs up a pile of debts, well, you have run up a pile of debts.  Your creditors can go after your bank account, your house, your car, anything you own.  If a corporation runs up a pile of debts, the creditors can look only to the assets of that corporation.

The morons on the right are always talking about running the government the way you run your family budget, as though that made any sense at all.  So let's test out their theory.  We will require that corporations be run that way, and if it works, well then maybe we will consider running the government that way.

The new economic model

Anyone who is paying any attention know that the recent attacks on Planned Parenthood have nothing to do with abortion and the sanctity of human life.  Abortions are not the main purpose of Planned Parenthood.  The main purpose is women's health and birth control.  But taken in context will all of the other actions of the right, it makes perfect sense.

Let's try to summarize the current Republican agenda.

• Implement laws to make it harder for the poor to vote, as evidenced by a spate of voter suppression laws being passed in Republican controlled states.
• Under the guise of 'torte reform', make it harder for individuals to hold businesses accountable for their actions.
• Attack public education, stripping both primary and secondary education of funding, demonize underpaid teachers, resulting in less educational opportunity for all but the wealthy.
• De-fund organizations that provide birth control, and cancer screenings for women.
• Remove 'restrictive' regulations on business, like child labor laws, or those that protect worker safety, food safety, or the air you breath, the water you drink.
• Strip workers of their rights to collectively bargain.

 But if you think about it, this all makes sense.  In a feudalistic society, the purpose of the peasants are to supply labor and soldiers.  The value of women is to produce children and then hurry up and die so that your workers do not waste time caring for them in their old age.  The more children they produce, the cheaper your labor costs are.  And if you disenfranchise them, both by taking away their vote, and their rights to organize, they will not be able to do anything about it.

And if you have plenty of them, you don't have to worry if too many of them are poisoned on the job or die in the mines.  There are plenty more where they came from.

Of course, you will still need a tiny middle class.  Someone has to be the physicians and the engineers and scientists who take care of the needs of the landed gentry.  But you don't need many of them.  And knowing they could be tossed back into the pile of peasantry at any moment should make them easy to control.

This model has worked for the benefit of the ruling class in one form or another for thousands of years.  You think our little 200+ year experiment is viewed as anything except a fluke by those on the right?  Think again.  You have a front row seat to what has happened to other social experiments of the past, when the old guard decides that enough is enough.

Unless you decide to do something about it.

A small jab at hypocrisy

I am sure it came as no surprise when it was revealed that Teahaddist darling and stimulus critic Michele Bachmann sent a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack thanking him for the use of stimulus money to help support the Minnesota pork industry, and encouraging him to spend more.  After all, who doesn't expect hypocrisy from a politician?

Now it is my understanding, that in many cases, exactly where money will be spent is not in the legislation itself, there is considerable flexibility by the federal agencies that are disbursing the money.  So how about this?

If you as a congressman voted against it, then none of the money goes to your district.  If both of the state's senators voted against it, skip that state.   You want to take credit for bringing home the bacon, then actually help bring it home.  Time to play a little hardball.