Opinion: Setting the record straight on pension reform
By Arnold Schwarzenegger
Recently some critics have accused me of bullying state employees. Headlines in California papers this month have been screaming “Gov assails state workers” and “Schwarzenegger threatens state workers.”
I’m doing no such thing. State employees are hard-working and valuable contributors to our society. But here’s the plain truth: California simply cannot solve its budgetary problems without addressing government-employee compensation and benefits.
Arnold Scharzenegger
As former Speaker of the State Assembly and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown pointed out earlier this year in the San Francisco Chronicle, roughly 80 cents of every government dollar in California goes to employee compensation and benefits. Those costs have been rising fast. Spending on California’s state employees over the past decade rose at nearly three times the rate our revenues grew, crowding out programs of great importance to our citizens. Neglected priorities include higher education, environmental protection, parks and recreation, and more.
Much bigger increases in employee costs are on the horizon. Thanks to huge unfunded pension and retirement health-care promises granted by past governments, and also to deceptive pension-fund accounting that understated liabilities and overstated future investment returns, California is now saddled with $550 billion of retirement debt.
Who says union money can’t buy love by the billions? They could at least take their golden eggs from the goose as they dropped instead of greedily killing the goose to get all the golden eggs at once.
Their plan is starting to fall apart as the rest of us taxpayers see the light.
The state’s antiquated, bloated, benevolent, generous government employee pension and benefits system is clearly fantasy and simply unsustainable. Wake up, California legislators. Before you literally get thrown out and are forced to find real employment where performance and common sense count.