When a ship at sea is hit by a storm threatening the safety of the vessel, the command
“All Hands on Deck” is sounded. It's the nautical reaction to avoid foundering. I submit our Commonwealth Ship of State is in immediate danger of financially foundering unless we rally as a crew.
For more than a decade the storm clouds gathered but Mr and Mrs Pennsylvania taxpayer were too distracted trying to make an honest living to read the barometer. Back in 2002 I began to sound the alarm using 3rd grade math to predict the inevitable.
System (PSERS) has ballooned to over $53 Billion dollars! Meanwhile, Governor Wolf and our dysfunctional Legislature seem mesmerized with income redistribution and tax increases rather than attacking and eliminating the cause of the disease. Serious public pension reform is needed and the career Pols have run out of wiggle room.
There will always be opposition to public pension reform. Union bosses will be in the vanguard dedicated to sustaining their happy days of obscene benefit packages for their membership. Scratch beneath the surface of this radical element, dedicated to sustaining the unsustainable, and you'll find a majority of pragmatic teachers and state employees. The vast majority understand that something substantial must be changed or we'll all go down together.
Let's review the cause and effect of our pending calamity. More than a decade ago, career politicians voted themselves a 50% pension increase that flew under the radar of public scrutiny. Public union bosses threaten to blow the whistle unless they could wet their beak at the public trough so the Pols voted the public union membership a 25% increase. Everyone was as happy as hogs in slop. Here's the irony: There are only several hundred members of the Legislature so the annual damage to the taxpayer was measured in millions of dollars. As repugnant as this heist was, it represented chicken feed compared to the collateral damage caused by the 25% increase for nearly a million teachers and Commonwealth employees. The collateral damage, because of the large membership, is measured in billions of dollars. This debacle was caused by the greed of a few hundred career politicians. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, “ Never in the history of the Commonwealth, have so many, be so harmed, by so few.”
Just about the time I'm ready to give up on our dysfunctional legislature, a fresh face appears. In 2012, Representative John McGinnis was chosen by the people of the 79th Legislative District in Blair County to represent them. Hardly a career politician, this retired professor of economics views his assignment in Harrisburg as a star spangled pain in the neck(or anatomy due south) . The only question in the mind of McGinnis is whether or not to serve another term before getting back to the real world. I for one hope he remains long enough to see his proposed House Bill 900 or Senate Bill 1 enacted to end the abuse to the taxpayer of Public Pension Madness, a disease as spooky as the Ebola epidemic.
Familiarize yourself with the details of each bill. Either bill is infinitely better than the inaction of the past decade threatening to sink our Pennsylvania Ship of State.
One last suggestion: If your local legislative politician is a careerist, ask him publicly at his next town hall meeting how much of your tax money he's entitled to collect annually when he finally retires. Brace yourself for the sticker shock.
Stratton Schaeffer is a retired consulting engineer and farmer who lives on Joe Hill.