The Unaffordable Trickle Down: Private & Public

From the web:

"Everywhere in California, unions are relentlessly pushing back against even modest reforms to pension benefits. With unlimited money and manpower, implacable resolve, and perpetual energy, they will prevail again and again – until the tsunami of financial reality finally hits the shore.

Spokespersons for public employee unions supposedly abhor the manipulations and machinations of finance capitalists. Pointing to examples ranging from Enron to Goldman Sachs, they claim the workers are fleeced and the rich get richer. But their own house is dirty. The public institutions they control, the cities and counties of California, indulge in financial chicanery in order to create an illusion of solvency. They fail to recognize unfunded pension and retirement health care liabilities on their balance sheets. They refuse to disclose total outstanding statewide government debt. They mislead voters into believing government workers are actually undercompensated, when in fact they now earn total pay and benefits that are well over twice the average for the private sector workers they supposedly serve. They pretend budgets are balanced by offloading entire sections of government into “special districts,” playing a shell game of deception. They campaign for tax increases to “save our schools,” then instead give the money to their partners in oppression, the insatiable pension bankers.

A fair minded reader might protest that government workers should not be compared to the aristocracy of France in 1788. Fair enough. But the average pension for someone who works a full career in California’s state or local government is now nearly $70,000 per year. And to collect that much, risk free, in the private sector, requires millions (plural) in assets. And those multi-millionaires are precisely the people our public servants, through their unions, urge us to resent, to tax, to occupy, to overthrow. The language of revolt is theirs, not ours.

Filtered through the humble green eyeshades of proper accounting standards, shimmering in the Sacramento sunset, one does not see a skyline of government buildings staffed by benign bureaucrats. Rather one may see a Bastille, a Palace of Versailles, a Hall of Mirrors, the ornate furniture of an aristocracy ruled by the union noblesse."