Of Pensions and Christie

Would you buy a used pension from this man?

We just recently purchased new vehicles for my wife and daughter. We went to a total of five dealerships for those two cars. We found that two of the dealers were fair, in the sense that they did not try to hold us upside down by the ankles and shake money from our pockets like the others did.

The shadier dealers tried every trick in the book on us, including the old "Ask Three Questions to Get Them in a YES Frame of Mind" trick, which goes like this:

Salesman: Wasn't Adolph Hitler a terrible person?
Us: Yes.

Salesman: Weren't those 9/11 terrorist attacks awful?
Us: Yes.

Salesman: Wouldn't you like me to put you in this new car TODAY??
Us: We're outta here.

As awful as some of our experiences were, we ended up with two good deals, meaning they agreed to give us a car for a reasonable price and we agreed to pay them approximately forever.

Imagine now, if you will, the worst car dealer ever. He gets you to agree to purchase a very expensive car by offering you a great trade in. He takes the old car, but never delivers the new car. And he goes to court to make sure he never has to give your promised vehicle, and that you have to make the payments even though you got nothing.

Meet car dealer extraordinaire: Chris Christie. Except it isn't phantom cars he's pedaling--it's phantom pensions.

Four years ago, Chris Christie decided that he could no longer fund the state pension system, because he needed to give the taxpayers' money to the rich to buy diamond encrusted saddles for their polo ponies, and for taxpayer funded helicopter rides to his son's baseball games. So what happened was exactly what would happen to you if you stopped paying for your car. They repossessed New Jersey.

Just kidding, of course. Only the common people get things taken from them when they don't meet their obligations. What really happened was that Christie reached a deal with NJ's public employee unions, in which he agreed to make those payments if the unions agreed to pay more into the pension fund themselves.

For four years, the unions have dutifully paid their agreed portion, but Christie decided he did not have to actually do what he agreed to do. He stopped making payments. So this time around, they really did repossess New Jersey.

Just kidding again. What really happened was that Christie was taken to court and ordered to make the payments on the law he signed. End of story, right?

Well, no. He went to the NJ Supreme Court, which decided in its infinitesimal wisdom that it could not force Christie to make the 1.57 billion dollar payment he promised to make. Instead, the court said the governor and legislature--the ones who wrote the law in the first place--should figure it all out and fix the problem.

This is akin to the car dealer mentioned above. He takes what you had, gives you nothing new, and forces you to make payments for years. When it gets to court, the judge decides that the salesman and his manager should go back and figure out what to do about it.

In the mean time, public employees are keeping up their end, because they can not just stop paying in the money they agreed to like they're the governor or something.

This should be a cautionary tale for all public employee members. Never, EVER, agree to pay into the pension fund, because if you do, there is already a judicial precedent that the state does not have to hold up their end, but you do.

As things stand right now, New York is not in any serious danger of this happening, as the public employee pension systems and TRS are pretty solvent, mostly because our previous governors went to their kids' baseball games by land. But beware--now that the precedent has been set, you can bet Cuomo is working on his spiel already:

Cuomo: Aren't pensions a wonderful thing?
Unions: Yes.

Cuomo: Aren't you glad you can retire at 57?
Unions: Yes.

Cuomo: Wouldn't you like to contribute a portion of your salary to make sure things stay that way?

Our answer should be a resounding NO. Even if he throws in free rustproofing.

What I Learned In Kindergarten, And What Education Leaders Missed

I've always been a pretty big fan of Robert Fulghum. If you remember, he wrote one of the first essays to go viral on the internet, way back when people emailed such things to each other rather than post them to Facebook. It was called All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten. You can read it here if you've never read it before. Yes, it's sappy and sentimental, but it's oh-so-true.

The premise of the essay is that if we all behaved as we were taught to in kindergarten, the world would be a better place. Here are some examples of things Fulghum exhorted us to do, and how education leaders have failed us.

Share everything.
Almost nothing is shared with teachers. The rich get richer while teachers get laid off. Our billionaire mayor has seen fit to get rid of some of the most poorly paid school workers while offering no-bid contracts to his cronies. Bloomberg has eliminated Teacher's Choice, so teachers will have to dig into their own pockets to supply our kids with materials they need to succeed. Teachers know how to share. Billionaires don't.

Play Fair.
The DOE and UFT agreed--in writing--to keep teachers' TDR scores confidential. The DOE even agreed to side with the UFT in court should it come to that. Instead, they went back on their agreement and are now pushing for the release of the scores. This will unfairly hurt many teachers, but the DOE doesn't care. Bloomberg would like for teachers to be publicly humiliated, but when his deputy mayor was arrested for domestic violence, Bloomie hid that fact from the public. If the deputy mayor had been a teacher, that wouldn't have happened.

Clean up your own mess.
You'd think the DOE would feel obligated to enforce a minimum of cleanliness in schools, but you'd be wrong. The rate of bedbug infestations has tripled in the last year. And instead of stopping the use of dangerous dirty oil in schools, the city decided to spend 70 million dollars on it (but don't worry--that will only last until 2030). To be fair (play fair!), the city is promising to only take ten years to rid school lighting fixtures of cancer causing PCBs.

Don't take things that aren't yours.
NJ Governor Chris Christie would like to solve the state's pension shortfall by shafting teachers and other workers who have contributed their share to the system over the years. He withheld a 3 billion dollar payment that the state owes to the pension fund. That money was not his--it was money that was promised to the pension system through collective bargaining. Christie rationalized this by saying the state can't afford to pay for the things it promised, even though he refused to ask his millionaire and billionaire pals to pay an extra cent. I wonder what Christie's kindergarten teacher would say about that?

Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
There's none of that in the public schools. It's all testing, all the time.

I'm sure I could go on and on, but you get the point. The government in general and educational leaders in particular have forgotten the most basic lessons that they should have internalized long ago. One hopes they at least remember to flush.

Amnesia-Nomics

Does anyone remember Reaganomics? If you recall, Ronald Reagan believed in supply-side or "trickle down" economics. The theory was that government should cut expensive social programs, like Medicare. Instead, the money would be spent on even more expensive defense programs, such as the Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars" defense system. SDI was the perfect Republican program, as it would have cost endless billions and no one was even sure if it would ever work, much like Bloomberg's CityTime scandal. As a result, the federal government could funnel unlimited tax payer funds into the pockets of defense contractors for the rest of eternity without making us any safer. Rather like Homeland Security.

Republicans have been beating the trickle-down drum ever since, but lately they've run into a problem. Middle class and working class families have begun to notice that no money or jobs are actually trickling down to them. Despite a drop in the marginal tax rate for the rich from 70% to 28% (and 15% for hedge funds), the middle class has shrink to almost nothing and the country has hit new highs in unemployment. Republicans, of course, are calling for more tax cuts, on the theory that if something doesn't work, it may as well make the rich even richer. But people are beginning to catch on, and the Republicans need something even more bold, even more recklessly stupid than Reaganomics. NJ Governor Chris Christie has piloted this new idea in his dealings with teachers unions and pension costs in his state.

I'm coining a new phrase for this daring fiscal move, which I'm calling Amnesia-nomics. It works like this. States like New Jersey have historically refused to pay teachers and other state workers the wages they deserve. Instead, over the years, they have agreed to contracts with unions promising pension and health benefits. So rather than actually funding those contractual obligations, people like Christie spent the money on other, more important things, such as flying the governor in a helicopter to see his son play baseball. So, to make ends meet, Christie began to "forget" to pay some of his bills. For example, last year, he forgot to make a three billion dollar payment to the state's pension fund. Today, he is signing historic legislation that will, essentially, "forget" most of the contractual promises New Jersey has made in the past to its workers. Thus, Amnesia-nomics was born.

It's a great concept. Imagine if we all could use it in our own lives? Imagine if we could "forget" to pay the cable bill, and the cell phone bill, and the mortgage, and still got to keep our TV shows, our iPhones, and our McMansions? Wouldn't that be great? Of course, if you try it, you will be forced into bankruptcy and have all your possessions taken away by Dog the Bounty Hunter. Luckily for the states, all they have to do to renege on their promises is to pass a bill!

Amnesia-nomics, as practiced by Christie, has proven hugely popular with Republicans, who now want to duplicate it nationally. For example, Paul Ryan got the ball rolling by suggesting that the US should forget about its obligations to its citizens who have been paying into Medicare for decades. Then, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul really upped the ante by suggesting that the United States should declare bankruptcy, starting by defaulting on over a trillion dollars of debt to the Federal Reserve. Why pay your debts when you can just let them slip your mind, Chris Christie style?

If Amnesia-nomics works, imagine where we can go with it. America can "forget" to pay all 14 trillion of its debt and start with a clean slate! Then, to make sure we never get ourselves into this kind of trouble again, we can "forget" about a lot of our other obligations, like health care, Medicaid, social security, and so on. On a local level, states could "forget" about your pensions, union contracts, unemployment benefits, etc. The possibilities are endless.

Skeptics might ask how all of this will affect the middle and working class who depend on these government agreements to survive. I think I know how Republican would respond.

Forget about it.