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wbutterman 09/03/2010 4:02:00 PM
Greenhut has always been a bottom feeding abusive little snippet of a man - his doggrel in the Reg was a constant source of amusement due to the deranged libertarian tilt he applied to everything.
When will this sniveling little pip-squeek and his 83 IQ crawl back under the rock from whence he came?
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Fred Smoller 08/12/2010 8:40:00 AM
There are 3.1 million people living in Orange County. Why does it take 8 city managers (of the top 8 largest cities) to manage service delivery for 1.6 million residents, and 24 others to manage the rest? If were to start with a clean sheet, would we choose to organize Orange County into 34 separate cities, 28 school districts, and dozens of special districts? These are the types of questions that need to be asked if we are going to move our community forward.
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Bradley William Cagle 08/10/2010 11:55:00 AM
Honestly, you pretend left thinkers, counter "White Politicos", are just so profoundly drunken with perverse and twisted fascist thinking that I feel that there is little hope for any of us. You pretend to be journalists, with your pretense of being a publication dedicated to the people? You are obviously bought by FOX or some other fascist, corporate entity. That you are so blinded or purposefully criminal in your conduct as pretend journalists makes me and any other person who chosen to become a pleasant person, to PUJKE!!!!!
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R. Scott Moxley 08/10/2010 1:47:00 AM
Author's note: Dan Chmielewski objected to my use of the word "infuriates" as his view on Greenhut's book. He told me a more accurate word is "annoys."
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Tough Love 08/09/2010 10:19:00 PM
Responding to Chris Prevatt's comment:
(1) I agree that only in the most dire of circumstances should we reduce the pensions of those already retired. That being said, I do not feel the COLA increases should be so protected ... as nobody on the Private sector gets pensions with guaranteed Colas....and Civil Servants should get equal, but not better pensions.
(2) you said ... "The rates are set and can now in Orange County only be reduced by negotiation ...". You don't distinguish between reductions for new employees (which is now first beginning to happen) and reductions for current workers. Furthermore, you are silent on the issue of reductions only for FUTURE (not PAST) years of service for CURRENT workers. While pension formula reductions are routine in the Private sector for FUTURE years of service, Civil Servants (and their Unions) always take the position that formulas cannot be reduced even for FUTURE years .... please tell me WHY you feel this is fair (to taxpayers)?
(3) you said ..."The excesses are in management pay, not in that of non-management employees." You are basically correct, but ONLY with respect to "cash pay", NOT when "total compensation" (which includes pensions and heathcare benefits) is considered. The problem is that at EVERY (yes EVERY) income level, the employer (meaning taxpayer) paid-for share of the TYPICAL Civil Servant's retirement package (pension + retiree benefits) is 4+ times greater (6 times for safety workers) than the employer paid-for share of a similarly compensated Private sector worker retiring at the SAME age, and with the SAME years of service. Again, I ask ...WHY do you feel this is fair (to taxpayers)?
(4) you said ..."public employees as a group are not getting anything more than they actually have paid for." You can't be serious ???? Time and again, it has been shown that the Public sector employees RARELY pay more than 10-20% of the pension & benefits granted at retirement. And please .... lets not get into the phony discussion that "investments" pays for most of it. We both know that there are ONLY two original sources of contribution, the employee and the employer (meaning the taxpayers), and in the absence of these contributions, there would be no investment income. Stated another way, the interest earned on taxpayer contributions would have stayed in the taxpayers' pocket if he had not been forced to make the contribution.
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Chris Prevatt 08/09/2010 7:34:00 PM
Scott,
Thanks for including Dan and I in the debate. I do believe you may have misplaced some of my comments out of context. In doing so you seem to suggest that I do not think that public employee pensions should be a matter for public discussion.That perception is not quite accutate.
My disagreement was over when the discussion is appropriate, not if. Public employee salaries are a matter for public scrutiny, as are the benefits we receive. Pensions are one of those benefits. My feeling was that it is too late to debate the pension of a public employee when he or she has already retired. At that point, the public has had plenty of time to know how much the employee has been paid, and whatrate of pension they are scheduled to receive. I simply do not see the point in throwing a fit over something you cannot change, knew was coming, and failed to look at early enough to do anything about.
Pensions are paid on eligible compensation for the period a public employee has worked. The rates are set and can now in Orange County only be reduced by negotiation and only increased by vote of the people. The excesses are in management pay, not in that of non-management employees. Records show that on average general county workers retire at 60 yrs old and safety workers at 54.
The debate is being poisoned by misinformation and misunderstanding. I've writte a broader response over on TheLiberalOC.com that goes into greater detail, but really, public employees as a group are not getting anything more than they actually have paid for. Here is the addess for my commentary Time to stop demonizing public employee's, their pay, and pensions! http://bit.ly/chigF0
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08/09/2010 2:47:00 AM
Please, tough love. I make no bones about the fact I am a public employee. I'll gladly show my future pension earnings to anyone. You would see, like the vast majority of public servants, that it will not be 4 times what private pensions get. In fact, I pay more into my pension than my employer does, much like the rest of the public pays into social security of which most public servants will never receive. If you want to go after pensions, go after your elected officials and executive department heads who do not pay for their pensions, 401k plans or any other benefit they receive as government servants. My earlier comments were right on because Greenhut blames public employee pensions when, by everyones admission, pensions are only 10% of the problem. Focus on the real problems of a nanny state government that doesn't listen to its people. And, I'll still go on protecting you and yours because I love my job, not because of my pension.
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Phil Osborn 08/09/2010 2:37:00 AM
Brian & Tough Love
http://www.meetup.com/Freethought-Book-Club-of-Orange-County/
We're going to be discussing Life, Inc. by Douglas Rushkoff
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Tough Love 08/08/2010 5:46:00 AM
Dear Keep da Peace ... Nice bunch of BS and diversion form the issue.
Sounds like you're a Civil Servant riding this gravy train and REALLY REALY don't want your meal ticket derailed.
FYI, GASB isn't an accounting trick. It's purpose is to STOP both the politicians and Unions from hiding the true enormous cost of the pensions & benefits promised Civil Servants, to measure it, and state the amount on the balance sheet.
That's called transparency .... something Civil Servants certainly don't want divulged (the true cost of these promises).
Just WHAT makes you and your ilk SO "SPECIAL" that you deserve 4+ times greater pensions and benefits than those who pay for it (Private sector taxpayers).
Decades back, they called policemen "pigs" in a derogatory sense. Today, you have certainly EARNED that designation by your insatiable greed.
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08/08/2010 3:07:00 AM
Steve Greenhut has been spouting this vitriole for years. He was on the verge of getting canned from th Register so he decided to hightail it up to Sacramento for a startup company on... politics. Trouble it, he can't get off the whack-a-public-employee schtick and, if he is truly gone from the Register, why do they keep running his articles? Sounds like a contractor to me. The entire public pension debacle has been brought about by cheap accounting tricks known as GASB. Why? To take the heat off why governments, local and state, are in trouble; too many far right and far left ultra-politicos. When will politicians realize that most of California (and the nation) is MODERATE? They will give money to social programs but they want to make their own decisions on abortion, motorcycle helmets and holding their cell phones too close to their heads.
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brian 08/08/2010 2:56:00 AM
From Glenn Greenwald
Watching An Empire Die (With Public Unions Help I might add)
"As we enter our ninth year of the War in Afghanistan with an escalated force, and continue to occupy Iraq indefinitely, and feed an endlessly growing Surveillance State, reports are emerging of the Deficit Commission hard at work planning how to cut Social Security, Medicare, and now even to freeze military pay. But a new New York Times article today illustrates as vividly as anything else what a collapsing empire looks like, as it profiles just a few of the budget cuts which cities around the country are being forced to make. This is a sampling of what one finds:
Plenty of businesses and governments furloughed workers this year, but Hawaii went further -- it furloughed its schoolchildren. Public schools across the state closed on 17 Fridays during the past school year to save money, giving students the shortest academic year in the nation.
Many transit systems have cut service to make ends meet, but Clayton County, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, decided to cut all the way, and shut down its entire public bus system. Its last buses ran on March 31, stranding 8,400 daily riders.
Even public safety has not been immune to the budget ax. In Colorado Springs, the downturn will be remembered, quite literally, as a dark age: the city switched off a third of its 24,512 streetlights to save money on electricity, while trimming its police force and auctioning off its police helicopters.
There are some lovely photos accompanying the article, including one showing what a darkened street in Colorado looks like as a result of not being able to afford street lights. Read the article to revel in the details of this widespread misery. Meanwhile, the tiniest sliver of the wealthiest -- the ones who caused these problems in the first place -- continues to thrive. Let's recall what former IMF Chief Economist Simon Johnson said last year in The Atlantic about what happens in under-developed and developing countries when an elite-caused financial crises ensues:
Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or -- here's a classic Kremlin bailout technique -- the assumption of private debt obligations by the government. Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk -- at least until the riots grow too large.
The real question is whether the American public is too apathetic and trained into submission for that to ever happen.
UPDATE: It's probably also worth noting this Wall St. Journal article from last month -- with a subheadline warning: "Back to Stone Age" -- which describes how "paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue." Utah is seriously considering eliminating the 12th grade, or making it optional. And it was announced this week that "Camden [New Jersey] is preparing to permanently shut its library system by the end of the year, potentially leaving residents of the impoverished city among the few in the United States unable to borrow a library book free."
Does anyone doubt that once a society ceases to be able to afford schools, public transit, paved roads, libraries and street lights -- or once it chooses not to be able to afford those things in pursuit of imperial priorities and the maintenance of a vast Surveillance and National Security State -- that a very serious problem has arisen, that things have gone seriously awry, that imperial collapse, by definition, is an imminent inevitability? Anyway, I just wanted to leave everyone with some light and cheerful thoughts as we head into the weekend."
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Phil Osborn 08/08/2010 2:05:00 AM
Alexis de Tocqueville got a lot of things right in 1831, but I don't specifically recall him envisioning how the elected officials would conspire to vote themselves entitlement to the treasure of the nation. Maybe it was just too obvious to mention.
The problem is that this has no easy legal solution. These retirement funds are based on contracts mutually agreed to by bureaucrats for fellow bureaucrats, to be sure, but the elected officials who appointed the to-be-retirees or okayed the deals were probably acting legally. The public voted them the power and they used it.
In point of fact, the retiree problem is only one of many in which the beneficiaries of state action include those who are voting for it or authorizing it.
The "Progressive" Left has long bemoaned the influence of corporate power to enrich itself and gain special advantage via bribes of various kinds to elected or appointed bureaucrats. Their take is certainly valid, but misses the total picture. They would apparently like us to believe that somehow these poor, innocent public servants just HAD TO take that campaign money or those junkets to Samoa, or risk falling behind at the polls or losing favor with the elected officials who appointed them.
Just reign in corporate power via more of the boards, commissions, investigators, panels, Senate or House committees, laws, rules, standards, etc., and everything will be fine. Never mind that the smarter of those appointed to those regulatory positions fast track into positions in the very corporations they are appointed to regulate. In fact, right from the beginning of “Trust Busting,” it was the Trusts who were financing the very Trust Busting that was supposed to regulate and control them. They certainly knew the score.
And, as for scores, how many California corporations have actually ever been taken to court over their failure to live up to the “operate in the public interest” clauses of the official documents of incorporation? Until recently, at least, that score is “0”, ZERO, NADA, ZILCH. Who controls who here? Is REFORM the answer to total failure?
Nor are the neo-Progressives and their intellectual ancestors such as the Italian Fascists so stupid as to be unaware of this. While the regulatory jungles they have created do little to prevent actual harm to the public, they are configured to create barriers to entry that allow the corporate dinosaurs the freedom to ignore efficiency, ignore customers, and spend their time gaming the system, guaranteeing those golden parachutes even as their shareholders lose their shirts.
And in this context of self-sustaining corruption we expect WHOM to be honest?
Just what IS the plan for dealing with the crushing burden of vast retirement entitlements, and who is going to be on what side? Certainly, a vast MOB of retired or to be retiring bureaucratic vultures will be up in arms at any proposal aimed at reducing their stolen largesse, and many of them will be attorneys or former judges. Will this Old Boy network give away its overwhelming advantage? Is that a rhetorical question?
So, the change will have to come from outside and it will have to be radical.
The only substantial group currently in the position of total outsiders and not on the payrolls in question are the Tea Partiers, bless their hearts. This is a slim reed and could fall apart at any moment, but it’s all we have.
We DON’T HAVE THE MONEY… BUT, WE OWN THE MONEY.
Practical solutions?
Solution 1: BANKRUPTCY! For the State of California. Then the retirees will have to get in line with the other creditors for a small percentage of their original claim.
Solution 2: TAX THE RETIREES! (And this comes from a long-time tax resistor…) This only applies to State, County and Local, and – failing the bankruptcy option – it should be progressive. Maybe, no extra taxes for those who are receiving less than $50,000, including any Social Security, and then a sliding scale of increasing taxes for those whose public trough funding is more, such that someone getting $200,000 will have to pay $100,000 in taxes on it.
Both of these solutions are about as fair and politically practical as we can expect in the circumstances. Since the vast majority of public servants make less than $50,000 in retirement, or so I have read, most of them will be unaffected and should not therefore be adamantly opposed. If we do go into bankruptcy it will likely be because we have no choice – and maybe we don’t, and then the cuts may be more substantial and hit more of the lower income retirees.
So, we should probably shoot for Solution #2. If it isn’t enough, so be it.
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Biff 08/07/2010 9:38:00 PM
Why bother giving Chmielewski any credence at all?
The boys over at the Lib OC have mostly abandoned any pretense at standing up for progressivism in favor of toadying to unions and OC's Dem establishment -- which is why the contents of OC's "top local political blog" often consist of nothing more than warmed-over Loretta Sanchez press releases and too-mundane-to-care posts over Chmielewski's "blog war" with Art Pedroza.
Rocking the boat might mean that Dan and Chris would start getting the cold shoulder at next year's Truman Dinner, and we can't have that.
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Dan Chmielewski 08/06/2010 10:26:00 PM
Perhaps Supervisor Moorlach could explain why he's so against pensions for union employees while taking advantage of the pension system for his own personal benefit.
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well said 08/06/2010 8:19:00 PM
Finally an objective & thoughtful view of the situation & both perspectives for the rest of us.
Thank-you SM & OCW.
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Tough Love 08/06/2010 8:12:00 PM
The Unions will NEVER allow, and politicians will NEVER approve sufficient SUFFICIENT pension & benefit reductions.
OUTSOURCE 90+% of ALL Civil Servants. This end the "employment relationship" and stops FURTHER growth of these obscene pensions dead in it's tracks.
