Battle Looms Over Huge Costs of Public Pensions
• NY TimesThere’s a class war coming to the world of government pensions. The haves are retirees who were once state or municipal workers. Their seemingly guaranteed and ever-escalating monthly pension benefits are breaking budgets nationwide.
Much better than whacking everybody the same amount would be to means test the pensions. This is a much better solution for a number of reasons. Some of those reasons are that those getting the higher pensions were usually the ones who made the decisions that got us into this mess. They also have, or should have had the means to save and invest. Taking 20% of a 100K a year, has much less of an adverse affect than taking 20% off of 50K a year. In addition, I suspect that the grunts in the trenches were much less likely to manipulate their pensions than managers were.