Unions here and there, and everywhere

George Rebane

Speculator – one who engages “in business transactions involving considerable risk but offering the chance of large gains, esp. trading in commodities, stocks, etc., in the hope of profit from changes in the market price.”

Greece’s public employee unions have almost bankrupted that country; everyone in the EU knows that and is demanding that they be reined in.  A natural place to start is to remove the country’s constitutional guarantee for lifelong jobs in the state sector.  They can then work on their union pension formulas.  Instead, their public sector unions are urging state employees to walk off their jobs to further paralyze the country.

In the meantime, their prime minister Papandreou is in Washington visiting a fellow socialist, and publicly bashing the only people left who will loan money to his fiscally floundering country.  Apparently they are being railed against as “speculators” for insuring their loans.  Anybody these days who lends money to Greece is rightly a speculator and should wear that moniker proudly, even if she is the hesitant chancellor of Germany.  It is only the dim-witted and the elite progressives – a remarkable cohort - who do not understand the salutary role speculators have played to advance humanity.

Speaking of today’s pre-educated, did you notice the tenor of the ‘pro-education’ demonstrations last week?  These socialists-in-training were demanding that their tuition fees be kept sacrosanct while the rest of the state has to tighten its belt.  They offered no solutions for lowering/containing the cost of education beyond raising taxes on businesses (which don’t pay taxes) and the rich.  I wonder how they would digest this little piece of California public service union history reported in the 10mar10 WSJ.

In 1999, the Democratic legislature ran a reckless gamble that makes Wall Street's bankers look cautious. At the top of a bull market, they assumed their investment returns would grow at a 8.25% rate in perpetuity—equivalent to assuming that the Dow would reach 25,000 by 2009—and enacted a huge pension boon for public-safety and industrial unions.
 

The bill refigured the compensation formula for pension benefits of all public-safety employees who retired on or after January 1, 2000. It let firefighters retire at age 50 and receive 3% of their final year's compensation times the number of years they worked. If a firefighter started working at the age of 20, he could retire at 50 and earn 90% of his final salary, in perpetuity. One San Ramon Valley fire chief's yearly pension amounted to $284,000—more than his $221,000 annual salary.
 
In 2002, the state legislature further extended benefits to many nonsafety classifications, such as milk and billboard inspectors. More than 15,000 public employees have retired with annual pensions greater than $100,000.

And if that were not enough, “this year alone $3 billion was diverted from other programs to fund pensions, including more than $800 million from the UC system.”  The state employees’ pension costs have soared over 2,000% in the last ten years, and there’s no end in sight.  Meanwhile the collectivist chorus continues to accuse the bearers of this message as simple union bashers.

The brighter bulbs in the student body could instead organize to vote out the legislature that has sold them down the river, or as the WSJ advises, adopt Plan B – “quit school and become a state billboard inspector.”

Comments

[Dave C]

Let's not forget spiking (porking up)a public employee's salary in their final year.

[George Rebane]

Good poind Dave. We have to remember that Cal State offers courses to public service employees on strategies to increase their pensions that involve all kinds of arcane petitions and legal approaches. And, of course, the taxpayer pays also pays for this 'education'.

[Dixon Cruickshank]

Its all just to funny in a way, I would loan Greece a plug nickel right now - I'm not sure anything less than 15% short term would work, too long and they are gone - like I said before striking against themselves.