Live election blog: As in San Jose, San Diego voters also curbing pensions

[rayofreason]

Source: MercuryNews.com

8:50 pm: San Diego voters also curbing city employee pensions

Two of the three largest cities in California are turning back public employee unions tonight. With 16 percent of precincts reporting, voters in San Diego are overwhelmingly approving Proposition B, a measure that would put new city employees into 401k programs, and limit the top salary that workers could use to compute pensions. The measure leads 69-31 percent, a margin very similar to the lead enjoyed in San Jose by Measure B, which would require city workers to pay more for their pensions or receive limited benefits.

Read more: http://www.mercurynews.com/elections/ci_20790004/live-election-blog-what-watch-tonight

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Wisconsin was not the only election today. San Diego has a (R) mayor, and San Jose has a (D).

[kelly1mm]

1. It may be time to examine why the general voter out there seem to be against

public employee unions and the pension/pay benefits of the workers and what we should do about it. This is not only happening in WI, but CA, NY, MA (and nationally with the Obama administration's attacks on teacher tenure). Maybe to soon to have a real discussion about this but I believe it will be major by November.

[rayofreason]

2. One problem is pensions...

...not the size, the structure. Pensions are a promise to pay a certain amount in the future, no matter what the circumstances. It is easy to defer contributions (rob Peter to pay Paul), or to have a moron screw up the investments, or to have unrealistic expectations for returns. So that means that government budgets get stressed to pay for the pensions.

With a 401K what you have is it what you have. No one is one the hook for your retirement. I have a 401K. Many other voters do too. Perhaps if public unions moved rapidly to embrace the kind of retirement planning that most people have would dissipate the unhappiness that many voters feel about being on the hook for someone else's retirement.

[Blue_Tires]

4. DUers from a certain generation will be happy to remind you

of the days when many private companies had pensions for their employees...

In a sane world, people would fight to get private sector pensions returned, especially with the profit margins and CEO salaries of some of these megacorps...Of course, it's just easier to curse and spit hate at the public employees because god dammit, they deserve to be just a miserable as the rest of us...

[golfguru]

9. Earnings in Wisconsin: Public Vs. Private

Average public worker in WI makes just under $90,000 benefits included.
Average non-government worker in WI makes under $70,000 benefits included.

That is probably the basic reason why mayor Barrett lost to governor Walker.

[IndyJones]

26. And in November, we'll see more areas voting the same. Ah, and then there is double dipping.

[hay rick]

10. That would be my generation.

It seems to be time to pull Americans with pensions down into the same hole that the 401Kers find themselves in. That will work...

[nanabugg]

15. And the fools don't realize that the reason 401k are so low is because of the scam artists

controlling them. Doesn't anyone remember ENRON?!!!

[quakerboy]

25. I could be wrong

But weren't the private company pension plans controlled by the same scam artists?

[jtuck004]

8. With a 401K what you have is a growing number of people in poverty at 65.

This is a solution?

A couple of weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that 401(k) plans wouldn’t provide many soon-to-be retirees the income they needed for retirement...

401(k) plans were a way to give rich people, who were already going to invest that money anyway, a tax break for doing so. This was a common theme of the Carter/Reagan* era for you young’uns. They were also a way for employers to avoid having to support fixed benefit pensions and thereby reduce compensation (i.e., retirement benefits) to employees (cutting back on retirement benefits was another theme of the late 70s and 80s). The advocates of these plans never even thought about middle class workers. They–you–didn’t enter into the calculations at all.

And now we have an entire generation of ‘citizen investors’ who have been played for suckers:

Traditional or defined benefit pension plans, properly administered, increase economic efficiency, while the newer defined contribution plans have high costs whether done one at a time through Individual Retirement Accounts or in group plans like 401(k)s.

Efficiency means that more of the money workers contribute to their pensions – - money that could have been taken as cash wages today – - ends up in the pockets of retirees, not securities dealers, trustees and others who administer and invest the money. Compared to defined benefit pension plans, 401(k) plans are vastly more expensive in investing, administration and other costs.
...

401K's are just a scam to give more of the money you earn to the wealthy. Morons still screw up investments, money is still lost.

But the rentier class lives for a way to stick their proboscis into that financial stream, sucking from your labor, and it's even better when they can convince people it's good for them.

But perhaps the increasing number of baby boomers will remember the opportunities that were afforded them because of the investments made when we were "on the hook for someone else's retirement" (what a fucking selfish way to put that) and change things.

[kelly1mm]

11. So is the best path (politically) to fight to keep those pensions for public employees or to realize

that that ship has already sailed and agree to 401k's for (at least) new hires? I don't know for sure but I don't like the way the wind seems to be blowing and I don't know if the (politically) correct thing to do is go down with that sinking ship.

[golfguru]

29. The best path is what is affordable

We can learn best by observing actual examples. There are many all around us.
Greece, Spain, California come to mind. I am talking about in the long run. Only
option which seem to work best is what the state/country can afford without going
broke.

[Dont call me Shirley]

28. Wall St loves 401Ks, they're much easier to steal.

Sad, you've bought into the phony "free market" myth and the divide & conquer tactic of the reichies that 401k holders should be angry at traditional pension holders, sad!

[Blue_Tires]

3. Because the RW has campaigned against it endlessly

And it's human nature to want simple answers to complex issues...That's why "scapegoat" politics have been so effective for centuries....

[Peregrine Took]

13. +100.

[stockholmer]

6. Its called reverse schadenfreude (ie misplaced bitterness and envy)

Historically, the trade-off of a public-sector job vs a private one was that in the public sphere you got less pay, but more security and defined benefits.

Starting in the 1970's, accelerating in the 80's and 90's, and exploding from 2007/8 onwards, the combination of dollar debasement/inflation, the destruction of 85%+ of the US industrial/manufacturing base, and the off-shoring of massive amounts of other private-sector jobs led to a reversal in pay.

The public sector employee is barely treading water (in terms of true purchasing power, adjusted for inflation), but the private sector one is getting crushed. Thus, many victims of this brutal oligarchic implosion see (helped along by huge RW propaganda) the public worker as an over-paid parasite.

[kelly1mm]

12. I agree that historically that was the case that public employees traded income for pensions/

security but that is not the reality today. Do we tie ourselves to preserving pubilc employee (defined benefit) pensions at all costs or do we realize that the voters are not with us on this any longer and it may be dragging down otherwise winning tickets? I don't know the answer but I think it is a discussion that needs to be had.

[stockholmer]

14. unions (both public and private) are some of the few mass organisations that can

stand up to the oligarchs who own both parties in the US. That being said, in some of the major areas (NYC and California come to mind), there are contracts that were negotiated years ago that are so costly, so rife with abuse, and so out of step with the current reality of a crumbling US workforce that they make very easy targets to scapegoat. The danger is when all the rest of the union deals are conflated with these outliers.

There is a direct correlation between the decline of labour force unionisation (especially private unions) and an large erosion in the overall American household standard of living. Back in the late 1950's and early 1960's, the purchasing parity power and the union rates were at or near historic highs. The private unions have been decimated, whilst the only growth has been in the public ones. As government debt soars, these public unions are now squarely in the cross hairs. Thus you get Wisconsin.

A vastly overlooked legacy of the Cold War in the US has been the conflation of the term socialism (which is then falsely ramped up to communism, many times at an implied, subliminal level) with an form of public social safety net. The oligarchs have been more than happy to promote this huge falsehood.

When I lived in the US, even many of the truly poor I met thought they were just one or two breaks away from being 'rich'. This ethos (indeed the very belief that being rich and having an insane amount of material goods is one of the principal reasons to strive for) is so deeply ingrained in the American zeitgeist that I fear it will be a principal thread in the collective noose that will strangle the majority of its citizens.

There are no easy answers. When I see results such as this failed recall attempt at rollback of the Koch model (especially the reasons given by Republican voters), I tend to drift towards dystopian visions of a future America of cat food as a dietary staple, armed drones watching all, 80 year old retirement ages, slave labour conditions, 10 to 15% involvement in the prison-industrial gulag complex (whether inmates or guards thereof), endless empiric wars, and several hundred million dupes still thinking they too can be a neo-feudal overlord, if only they do the 'right thing'.

Protestant work ethic for the serfs, and all that jazz. IMHO, this is not right around the corner, but it is on the slow-slog march towards a town near you.

[Bigredhunk]

5. Bingo

It's the "You shouldn't have it better than I do"-mentality. The rw has brilliantly pitted regular people against each other. People don't have disdain for wealthy people. I have a guy who lives up the hill from me (this is VERY small town Iowa) who has a movie theater in his house, a gymnasium behind his house, a separate stone cottage for his daughter's dolls, etc... This is a guy who installed a nearly $100,000 retaining wall, didn't like the way it looked, so he had them rip it out and build something else. ANYWAY, nobody resents him. They applaud him. They (delusionally) want to be him. It's their neighbor who makes $4k a year more than them who they hate.

rw'ers are evil, but they've been very effective at doing all their message stuff for the last 30 years.

[Skittles]

7. good post

welcome to DU, Bigredhunk

[slackmaster]

17. No, it's actually about money. Spending by the Yes on B campaign (San Diego) was about 5 times...

...the amount spent on No on B. Several large business interests including a TV station and our local newspaper, which is now owned outright by a major downtown developer, supported it; as did leading mayoral candidate Carl DeMaio who is a Republican and strongly pro-business (and openly gay.) Sentiment among voters is very strongly in favor of controlling long-term costs.

http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/San_Diego_Pension_Reform_Initiative,_Proposition_B_%28June_2012%29

It's the "You shouldn't have it better than I do"-mentality. The rw has brilliantly pitted regular people against each other.

I'm sorry I have to point this out because it's so obvious, but the left is often accused of exactly the same thing when calls for raising taxes on the rich are put out.

People don't have disdain for wealthy people.

Speaking on my on behalf and for a whole lot of people I know personally, most of us don't have disdain for public employees either. We think people should be compensated fairly, but fairness cuts both ways.

[Blue_Tires]

19. If fairness cuts both ways, I'm hard pressed to remember a recent time

when the moneyed interests didn't have the breaks go their way...They've been on quite the legislative win streak...

[slackmaster]

20. Moneyed interests have had the breaks going their way since money was invented

There has NEVER been a time when having money didn't provide a big advantage over people who had less money.

[Arugula Latte]

23. But yet there is no blowback against CEO plunder

Insane.

[nanabugg]

16. Our problem is that there is no voice out there educating the masses about how they are being played

Public service employees have always been behind the 8-ball for salaries and benefits. That's why so many graduating seniors would opt for private sector jobs over public sector jobs. Now that the 1% have scammed, extorted, and robbed those private sector gurus of their 401(k)s and other benefits, including job security, they want to bring the long lagging public sector down to their own level instead of fighting to keep what was originally bargained for. But who even understands this with the like of FOX, Limbaugh misinforming and pitting workers against their own unions??? The left needs to spend more money on educating and informing by pushing its way into major media advertising like the GOP does. And the simplest way to get this done is to let people know that selection of Supreme Court Justices in the future key to whether or not the American standard of living as the boomers knew it is going to be maintained and improved upon. Citizens United must be overturned and voting rights must be ensured for the nation.

[slackmaster]

18. The management-level public employees I know personally are doing better than I am

One schoolmate entered the San Diego County lifeguard service in his early 20s. He retired as an officer at age 52 with a sweet benefit package.

Another long-time friend is a mid-level manager in the Health and Human Services Department. She's making about the same salary I do as an experienced IT worker in the private sector, but her health insurance is much better than mine and she plans to retire at age 58 and receive a substantial percentage of her salary as a defined-benefit pension. She's told me how much of a hassle it is to terminate a non-performing employee in her department. The process can take up to two YEARS!

I was terminated from my last job on zero notice with no severance pay after three years of good performance, because the VP of IT thought he could save a little money by outsourcing. I'm struggling to put enough into and manage a 401k and three self-directed IRAs that used to be 401ks, and I'm sadly lacking in financial management skills.

Public employees, at least in my county, have a much better deal.

[unreadierLizard]

21. Hate to say it, and I'll probably be flamed, but

it's true. Public workers/unions seem to have a nice cushy package. Seniority(age discrimination, essentially), fat pay, benefits, political clout...It's no wonder private sector workers like my parents resent unions.

[Blue_Tires]

22. I don't get that...

When did it become so acceptable to spit so much hate on a public worker's pay package? Your parents must *really* resent the military and cops by that measure, then...Their "seniority/fat pay/benefits/political clout" are much more than say, a schoolteacher, but I'm sure you already know that...

And fwiw, if your parents are that jealous, god forbid they apply for a public sector job themselves...

[SomeGuyInEagan]

27. Yeah, teachers, cops and firefighters are always driving around in BMWs, drinking Cristal ...

... bragging about being able to go to the doctor when sick.

You know, because of their "fat pay, benefits political clout" ... WTF?!

[KamaAina]

31. Why don't private sector workers like your parents join unions instead of resenting them?

The problem isn't that union workers are overpaid, it's that the rest of us are underpaid!

[Bigredhunk]

24. Exactly my point

Last edited Sun Jun 10, 2012, 01:19 AM - Edit history (1)

"So and so has a better benefit package than I do...makes more than I do." So fight for better wages/benefits at your job! Why should everyone else make less because you do?

I don't hate rich people. Yes, I resent that many of them got where they are because of connections or dumb luck or screwing people...and few acknowledge that. I don't hate that they're rich. I hate that they're paying a record low in taxes. It's one of the reasons things are so screwed up. I don't want the wealthy taxed at a higher rate to penalize them. I want them taxed at a higher rate because we've always had a progressive tax system in this country. Those who have more have always paid more. Well, they did when things were better. Then the rw wrestled power away from sensible wealthy people like Henry Ford, saying, "Why do we have to provide more for others...pay a living wage?" Then bush came in with his "temporary" tax cuts to get a "weak" economy rolling. Only he gave a disproportionate amount to the wealthy. & they were never going to be temporary. Whenever they were set to expire was going to be a bad time to have them expire...or rather, a bad time to "raise taxes" (as opposed to "letting temporary tax cuts expire&quot .

[KamaAina]

30. Correction: San Jose has a (DINO)

In addition to the union-busting, he's also a bigot about marriage equality. Ick.