The New York Times was kind enough to notice that public employee pensions are bankrupting many portions of the country:
A public university president in Oregon gives new meaning to the idea of a pensioner.
Joseph Robertson, an eye surgeon who retired as head of the Oregon Health & Science University last fall, receives the state’s largest government pension.
It is $76,111.
Per month.
That is considerably more than the average Oregon family earns in a year.
Oregon — like many other states and cities, including New Jersey, Kentucky and Connecticut — is caught in a fiscal squeeze of its own making. Its economy is growing, but the cost of its state-run pension system is growing faster. More government workers are retiring, including more than 2,000, like Dr. Robertson, who get pensions exceeding $100,000 a year.
Left out of that list: California, New York and Illinois.
The bill is borne by taxpayers. Oregon’s Public Employees Retirement System has told cities, counties, school districts and other local entities to contribute more to keep the system afloat. They can neither negotiate nor raise local taxes fast enough to keep up. As a result, pensions are crowding out other spending. Essential services are slashed.
Continue reading the main story“You get to the point where you can no longer do more with less — you just have to do less with less,” said Nathan Cherpeski, the manager of Klamath Falls, a city of about 21,000 in south-central Oregon.
Klamath Falls’s most recent biennial bill from the pension system, known as PERS, was $600,000 more than the one before. PERS has warned that the bills will keep rising. Mr. Cherpeski has had to cut back on repairing streets and bridges.
Even as the American economy is humming, many states and cities are still hurting from the 2008 financial meltdown. The crash hammered their pension funds and tax revenues, but didn’t reduce the amounts they owe retirees.
It wasn’t until 2016 that average state tax collections returned to pre-2008 levels. In the meantime, states and cities have had to rebuild pension funds to cover the rising numbers of retirees drawing benefits. That has left less money for the police, school sports programs and everything else. Local residents might not know why, but they are paying more taxes and getting scantier services in return.
Golly, if only the New York Times had been reading conservative and libertarian new source like BattleSwarm and Pension Tsunami, they could have found out this starting information years or even decade ago.
In related news, Illinois courts are already imposing mandated tax hikes on various municipalities to shore up underfunded public pension programs.
However, I bet that the next links in the logic chain (that all these locals seem to be controlled by the Democratic Party, and that fat pensions are a naked political payoff for the support of public employee unions who donate to and vote for Democrats, at the expense of the poor and middle class who see public services cut to pay for those fat pensions) will somehow continue to elude the New York Times…
Tags: Budget, Democrats, Illinois, Klamath Falls, Media Watch, Oregon, unions
“…pensions are crowding out other spending…”
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Why is it that taxpayers are forced to pay taxes to pay for “other spending” but then the money is prioritized to spend for pensions?
If you were to ask taxpayers what they would prefer their tax dollars to be spent on, “other spending” or pensions I bet most would say “other spending”.
Who made the decision to transfer taxpayer money from “other spending” to pay for pensions? That, or those, person/people should be fired, all assests forfeited, all income garnished, and receive long prison sentences for this massive theft.
Actually, NY Times writer Mary Williams Walsh has been publishing great public pension pieces for nearly a decade. Of course the rest of the paper gives politicians who ignore the problem a pass.
As Dan mentions — the author on this piece has been writing on public pensions in the NYT for years. And she does read Pension Tsunami, etc. She looks at a lot of sources…
….but it doesn’t always mean that the NYT will run any story she comes up with.
The NYT has been writing on pensions for years. Here’s an article Mary Williams Walsh wrote on local Illinois pensions in July, 2015.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/09/business/bad-math-and-a-coming-public-pension-crisis.html