Yesterday Governor Schwarzenegger announced the formation of a new commission to look at our state’s soaring pension obligations. The good news is that the Governor is making a proactive effort to look at this issue. The bad news is that public employee unions will NEVER, EVER consider adjusting public sector retirement benefits to mirror those in the private sector. You would have to look really hard to find private companies that offer such lavish ‘defined benefit’ programs (where retiree benefits are guaranteed to be a certain amount each year). In the private sector, retirement programs are almost always based on ‘defined contributions’ where an employer puts aside money into a fund on behalf of an employee while they work, often times matching contributions made by the employee themeselves.
We applaud the Governor for wanting to focus on this all-important issue, and we counsel the Governor to make sure he devotes a good number of his six appointees to this commission (he has set it up where he gets six, and each legislative leader gets three) are from the private sector.
The Governor penned a column for the Sacramento Bee today on this new commission, which has been given a year to do its job.
The Governor says he is seeking "bipartisan" solutions — but does he understand that the Democrat Party is OWNED by the public employee unions? And if you think for a minute that the CTA, or the CCPOA, or the other big public employee unions think that any kind of reduction in state employee benefits is even on the table… Then someone is being niaeve.
MORE READING SUGGESTIONS FOR THE BED-RIDDEN GOVERNOR:
If the Governor wants an even lighter read, how about Frederic Bastiat’s The Law (which he can print out here) or if not, Anthony Archie from the Pacific Research Institute has penned a column today, Which Way To Las Vegas?, where he explains why the number of people leaving California exceeds the number of people coming here