Forums: Public Housing

Taxpayers must cover at least a third of a $3 trillion bill for public employee pensions even if lawmakers eliminate cost-of-living increases and raise the retirement age, according to an academic study. “Even if states uniformly eliminated generous early retirement deals and raised the retirement age to 74, the unfunded liability for promises already made would still be more than $1 trillion,” Joshua D. Rauh, associate professor of finance at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in Evanston, Illinois, said in a statement.

Unlike private sector unions, the sheer number of workers represented is not the linchpin of [the public sector unions] influence. Private sector unions have a natural adversary in the owners of the companies with whom they negotiate. But public sector unions have no such natural counterweight. They are a classic case of "client politics," where an interest group's concentrated efforts to secure rewards impose diffused costs on the mass of unorganized taxpayers. A conflict of interest would be as follows: First, government union elects politician by funding their campaign and organizing a massive get-out-the-vote drive; second, politician supports employee pay...

Six-figure pensions. Impossible to be laid off or fired. Paid furloughs. Tons of vacation time. According to the media, these workers are the middle class. From ABC News: Civil Servants Find Themselves Cast in Unlikely Role -- Fat CatsThey are being cast that way because you only have to look at their salaries and pensions to deduce that. Move over Wall Street traders -- seems there's a new vampire squid in town. Civil servants? Passage Tuesday of a controversial bill sending billions of dollars to states to shore up payrolls for public school teachers further stoked the debate over whether...

The Obama Administration handed out more than $400 million in awards to federal employees last year, up by more than $80 million from the prior year, according to new government data. The biggest winners were air traffic controllers and top managers in Washington, a review of fiscal year 2009 salary reports from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management showed. OPM’s data, obtained by the Asbury Park Press through a freedom of information request, account for 1.3 million employees, or about 65 percent of the federal civilian work force.

What is it like to be a younger federal worker? (WP commie blog discussion) A new movement is shaking up the federal bureaucracy, as an expanding pool of idealistic, results-oriented Gen X and Yers challenges the predictability and authority-driven rules of the World War II generation and the pay-your-dues baby boomers who followed. The Obama administration hopes to fill 50,000 to 60,000 entry-level jobs in the next year, the largest burst since the Kennedy era. And the pipeline at the entry and mid-levels is opening fast as close to half a million baby boomers and older workers head out the...

Battle Looms Over Huge Costs of Public PensionsBy RON LIEBER Published: August 6, 2010 There’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. The have-nots are taxpayers who don’t have generous pensions. Their 401(k)s or individual retirement accounts have taken a real beating in recent years and are not guaranteed. And soon, many of those people will be paying higher taxes or getting fewer state services as their states put more money aside to cover...

Tropical Depression FOUR Public Advisory Home Public Adv Fcst/Adv Wind Probs Maps/Charts Archive 000 WTNT34 KNHC 021435 TCPAT4 BULLETIN TROPICAL DEPRESSION FOUR ADVISORY NUMBER 1 NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL AL042010 1100 AM EDT MON AUG 02 2010 ...NEW TROPICAL DEPRESSION FORMS IN THE ATLANTIC... SUMMARY OF 1100 AM EDT...1500 UTC...INFORMATION ----------------------------------------------- LOCATION...12.6N 41.1W ABOUT 1365 MI...2200 KM E OF THE LESSER ANTILLES MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS...35 MPH...55 KM/HR PRESENT MOVEMENT...WNW OR 290 DEGREES AT 17 MPH...28 KM/HR MINIMUM CENTRAL PRESSURE...1006 MB...29.71 INCHES WATCHES AND WARNINGS -------------------- THERE ARE NO COASTAL WATCHES OR WARNINGS IN EFFECT. DISCUSSION AND 48-HOUR OUTLOOK...

Four months after President Barack Obama enacted the Affordable Care And Patient Protection Act, House Democrats have revived a top liberal priority that was eliminated from the sweeping health care law in the latter stages of a grueling year-long debate: the public option. Armed with a new line of attack aimed at soothing deficit fears, Democratic Reps. Lynn Woolsey (Calif.), Jan Schakowsky (Ill.) and Pete Stark (Calif.) last Thursday unveiled a bill that would offer consumers the choice of a “robust” government-run insurance plan alongside the private plans in the law’s exchanges. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the bill,...

Police officers in Bay City, Mich., are being called domestic terrorists after renting billboard space to trumpet that the layoffs of five police officers in the town could lead to more shootings, stabbings, robberies and beatings. The police say they paid for the two billboards that went up last week to bring attention to the impasse in negotiations between its union and city officials, who are seeking a 10.8 percent reduction in labor costs from eight unions to tackle a $1.66 million budget deficit for the fiscal year that began July 1. The billboards also spotlight the city's decision to...

400 CPS teachers to get the ax this week200 other staffers also targeted on eve of key budget talks BY MAUDLYNE IHEJIRIKA Staff Reporter July 22, 2010 It has begun. The first round of the long-anticipated, school-based layoffs by Chicago Public Schools to deal with a record $370 million budget deficit will claim 600 staffers by week's end. Notices began going out Wednesday to 400 classroom teachers and 200 educational support personnel, a CPS official said. The 600 represent staff at about 200 Track E elementary schools that start their year earlier than most schools, on Aug. 10. The notifications...