"Pension reform is a bit like education reform: the facile solutions are not the correct solutions. In education, reformers tend to point to bad teachers, complain about how difficult they are to fire, and then propose that the necessary course of action is to test those teachers, evaluate them, and fire them at will if they’re not performing up to snuff. With pensions, reformers tend to point to firefighters or policemen who retired at age 50 with a fat pension after 25 years’ service, and who then happily work elsewhere for another couple of decades while simultaneously drawing a pension for much longer than they were actually working. On this view, the necessary reform is to roll back the plans which allow such behavior.
Take a step back, however, and what really needs to be done, in both cases, is a much bigger project — a project where there’s no need to take aim right now at public-sector employees. Start at the top, with the way the schools and the pension funds are structured; once you’ve fixed that, then maybe start moving down the ladder a little, if it’s still necessary — which it might not be."
Many (most?) Conservatives and many business people seem to see every problem as a current cost problem. The answer for every issue is to cut the expense,... benefits or wages, or just to not commit to any expensive project. Every solution must benefit the taxpayer in terms of fewer tax dollars paid at this moment. Real long-term value doesn't matter. Just cut the costs now.
If you chose the cheapest, just-make-it-run, fix every time your car broke, eventually you'd have a duct-taped, cobbled-together, unreliable piece of shit. We've been duct-taping the US economy together for quite a while now. It's time to start fixing things the right way or just buy a new car.
tnb
'via Blog this'
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