we are just starting to see the unraveling<\/a> of public pension systems that could well shake some of society’s basic foundations. Policemen, policewomen, firefighters, teachers and other public employees form the backbone of society. Many of these people happily take jobs offering lower wages in return for the psychic income of public service and, of equal importance, the financial income of a generous pension when they retire.<\/p>\n…expect a wave of [municipal] bankruptcies over the next decade as municipal pension plans get washed away by a tsunami of demographics and breakthroughs in longevity. In New York City, the average policeman retires at full pension at 48 years old and can expect to be paid over $2.1 million during the remainder of his life. In Houston, city workers can retire at full pension at 45 years old.<\/p>\n
A generation of politicians agreed to absurd promises to public workers because they knew it would be some other politician’s problem.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And to whose feet shall we lay the blame for this?<\/p>\n
Conservatives?<\/p>\n
Not so much. Try again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Americans are pissed – and rightfully so – that taxpayers got shafted in the AIG debacle, 90% tax rates and givesies backsies notwithstanding. Wait’ll ya see what happens when there’s a burglar outside or a fire burning inside their home… …and no one shows up. …we are just starting to see the unraveling of public […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":228,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,51,74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-democrats","category-liberal-tyranny","category-the-great-recession"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/228"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4450\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}