Archive for December, 2010
Thank God for California’s Public Employees!
Dec 23rd
Cross-posted at the FlashReport Weblog on California Politics
I’m looking sadly at the family refrigerator, imagining it as barren white slab, stripped of all the children’s artwork that makes it such an emotional focus of our home. And I’m thanking God for California’s public employees, because they made it possible for the Pearce clan, and all California clans, to enjoy the best of Crayola art while we put away the milk and cold cuts.
And it’s not just that. Without the fine folks whose paychecks are signed by John Chiang, we would be living in a gloomy and dangerous place. (I thought California was a gloomy and dangerous place, but now I know better.) We wouldn’t have known of this great debt we have to our state employees were it not for Willie Pelote of the American Federal of State, County and Municipal Employees, who wrote an open letter to Jerry Brown and published it in today’s California Labor Federation blog,
“Imagine being unable to take a walk in a park on a sunny afternoon or being unable to borrow books from the library or to hang a picture drawn by your child at school on the refrigerator.
“Imagine traversing potholed roadways or waiting hours to catch a train or bus home after work or telling your children that you can’t afford to send them to college.”
Pelote tells us that’s not just what could happen, no, it’s what already is happening for “the majority of Californians who have to work for a living” – as opposed, I suppose, to that minority of trust fund baby Californians who sit around drinking champagne and sending their butlers to cash their dividend checks. Why? Because we’ve bought into the false reality of thinking we can balance the budget by doing with a smaller state government. Foolish us!
I’m so glad Pelote made this an open letter instead of one of those infernal closed letters, because now I understand the risks to the very bedrock of American ideals – equal opportunity and a fair deal – that we would face if we ever eliminate a single additional state employee from the payroll. It’s not just that these folks are “stewards of the sources of our common wealth,” why they’re “necessarily more highly educated, more highly skilled, and more highly experienced” than the rest of us schleps. And that’s why they all rush to retire at 50 or 55 with their full salary and benefit package for life – if they didn’t, they’d become so much more educated, skilled and experienced that their heads would probably explode.
Pelote is really trying to help the incoming governor, because Lord knows, the man’s got a Gordian knot of problems to deal with. I’m sure Brown is relieved that the solution to it all is so clear. First, Pelote says, we’ll drop those pesky Enterprise Zones and the tax credits they provide to evil private sector employers. Then we’ll eliminate all those nasty corporate tax loopholes because they might encourage private companies to hire people who otherwise could become AFSCME union members. And the state should just knock off this crazy hiring of private contracting firms because, as Pelote has already explained, the public sector guys and gals are better educated, more skilled and more experienced – and let’s not forget, they’re nicer, less self-centered and more responsive, too!
Then, just to make sure there’s enough money flowing in to keep those benefits dollars flowing out, we’ll raise taxes. Not just any taxes, but taxes on capitalist, free-market types by taxing stock trades. That’ll hurt Wall Street, and we all know it’s Wall Street that we have to blame for our ills, not public employees, like the ones that forced Wall Street to give home loans to just about anyone, and the dedicated state employees who invested CalPERS money in top-of-the-market real estate. With the bureaucrats doing such a smashing job, why bother with a free market anyway, Pelote asks?
“If the free market is really as ideal a mechanism for creating wealth as its supporters claim, then why must taxpayers subsidize the operations of private sector companies?
“In fact, since the private sector has so far been unwilling or unable to produce the kinds of jobs we need to pull California out of recession, that is all the more reason to be vigilant with our tax dollars.”
Amen! Now that we’ve regulated and taxed it into oblivion, let’s just do away with that burdensome private sector entirely. Pelote and his union friends, smart as they are, can see a better world, where California agencies, departments, commissions, boards and councils will employ all of us, and as our union fees go to feather Pelote’s bed, we’ll spend our time writing regulations for each other in one big, happy festival of oversight and micromanagement, with comfortable salaries and splendid retirements for all.
It’s interesting that Pelote – who, after all, is just a consonant and a vowel away from “Pelosi” – couldn’t find a way to get the words “retirement benefits” or “pension spiking” into his open letter, or that with all his talk of rosier state finances he eluded any mention of the state’s $500 billion unfunded liability for the retirement and lifetime health benefits of our cherished older stewards of the sources of our common wealth. I’d probably understand why he did this if only I were better educated, more skilled and had more experience.
California Agencies Oblivious to the Budget Deficit
Dec 20th
Why in the world would California – caught as it is in a budgetary black hole – give $250,000 to some outfit in Oregon to build a government-subsidized fish market at Fisherman’s Wharf, California’s foremost free market fish market?
The answer to that question and much more on the budgetary obliviousness of California’s 300-plus departments, agencies, commissions, councils and boards is given in my new Daily Caller opinion piece, which you can read here.
Alternative Energy Makes State’s Budget Redder
Dec 20th
My friends at CalWatchdog just published my critique of the state’s insane energy policies. Why does California give incentives to folks to buy electric cars when every electric car sold takes money out of our all-too-broke budget? Why do people in Washington and Oregon fear California’s commitment to green energy?
Find out here. Please click through – it’ll make Steve Greenhut very happy.
Crazifornia in The Daily Caller: Keep Your Eyes on California
Dec 7th
The Daily Caller, my new favorite national political news portal, ran a piece by me as its lead opinion piece in this morning’s edition. Here’s the link (where you can sign up for a Laer Pearce RSS feed!), and here’s the piece as it appeared:
Keep Your Eyes on California
Don’t think California is done messing with America
By Laer Pearce
After the 2010 midterms, you could almost hear conservative pundits dismissing California as the land of fruits, nuts and irrelevancy. They couldn’t be further from the truth. Even though California doggedly stayed left while nearly every other state veered right, it still remains the supercharged engine for America’s progressive movement. If anything, the midterms just stomped down its accelerator.
California’s accelerated national influence is evident in what many dismiss as a loss for liberals, the defeat of Proposition 19, the marijuana legalization initiative. Most conservative commentators saw the vote against legal pot as proof that even California isn’t that crazy, but look again. More Californians voted to legalize marijuana than voted for Republican Meg Whitman for governor, even though Prop 19’s supporters spent a mere $4 million on their campaign, compared to Whitman’s $163 million.
Like earlier society-bending propositions on the California ballot — gay marriage and global warming are recent examples — the measure blazed the trail for similar efforts in other states. Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the pro-legalization Drug Policy Alliance, put it this way, “California’s Proposition 19 may not have won a majority of voters yesterday, but it already represents an extraordinary victory for the broader movement to legalize marijuana. Its mere presence on the ballot … elevated and legitimized public discourse about marijuana and marijuana policy.” Students for Sensible Drug Policy, another pro-legalization group, added, “One of the greatest hidden victories of the Prop 19 campaign was that it trained the emerging generation of marijuana reformers on how to run a legalization campaign, and left virtually all of them wanting to win on this issue in 2012.” Colorado is a likely target.
Similarly, California’s rejection of Prop 23, ensuring the state would continue its plunge into cap and trade even as Congress is backing away from similar legislation, has reinvigorated global warming activists. As the Daily Green blog put it, “The federal government needs to take a close look at the result.”
Prop 19 was on the ballot in California, not Kansas or Alabama or even Massachusetts, because supporters of liberal social change know they’ll get more publicity and possibly even a winning vote in unrepentantly liberal California. The state nurtured progressivism a century ago and has given the movement staying power through its modeling of liberal legislation and policies and the sheer number of progressives churned out by its universities — so much so that it’s not likely Barack Obama would be president today were it not for the very blue Golden State.
While the established political parties and their consultants will ignore California and pore over campaigns in other states for clues on how to capitalize on — or crush — the Tea Party’s influence, the Left will be studying what happened in California, so they can replicate it the next time around. What they will find is not so much a magic formula but a vast progressive infrastructure they will then work to replicate elsewhere.
I call this infrastructure the PEER Axis, for the progressives, environmentalists, educators and reporters who collectively run California and influence the underpinnings of America. The PEER Axis remains powerful because politicians and political movements may come and go, but government bureaucrats and regulators, environmentalists and social justice activists, and their supporters in education and the media are pretty much forever. The structure of California ensures that appropriately indoctrinated college graduates will continue to fill the personnel pipelines that run from Berkeley, UCLA and other liberal universities straight into the progressive movement.
Many end up in government offices in Sacramento, where they write policies that are parroted in other states around the nation, as evidenced by the fact that the federal government is following California’s lead in setting the next round of vehicle fuel economy standards. Others will go to work at California’s giant environmentalist organizations, social justice NGOs and activist law firms, or the powerful public employee unions. Some will stay on the campuses, turning out future generations of progressives and writing studies to reinforce and justify progressive government policies, and those who graduate into the media will publicize these efforts and belittle any contrarian thinking. Many will find jobs in California’s foremost culture-bending venture, Hollywood, where they will pummel all the world with green messages (The China Syndrome, Avatar), anti-corporate tirades (Metropolis, Wall Street), anti-war propaganda (Apocalypse Now, In the Valley of Elah) and movies challenging conventional values (Milk, Juno).
Wherever they end up, they will be greeted by like-minded alumnae ready to show them the ropes so they, too, can form and implement policy, bring lawsuits, and mold the next generation. Don’t be lulled into dismissing California’s influence just because of one election, because the California progressives will not be content to limit their focus to west of the Sierras. As Gavin Newsome, the San Francisco mayor and newly elected Lieutenant Governor of California, put it when he declared San Francisco open for gay marriages, “It’s gonna happen, whether you like it or not!”
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Laer Pearce, a veteran of three decades of California public affairs, is currently working on a book that shows how everything wrong with America comes from California.
CalWatchdog Runs “California’s Brain Drain”
Dec 6th
Thanks to the good folks at CalWatchdog for picking up my column, “California’s Crippling Brain Drain.” The piece explains how, besides saddling the state with a half-trillion dollars of unfunded pension obligations, public employees are retiring years before private sector workers do because the formulas used to compute their pensions encourage them to ditch their jobs just when they’re well seasoned. It concludes:
You’d think the very least our public sector cohorts could do would be to give their all for another 10 years or so, since it’s going to require all the brain power we’ve got to get California through the next decade. They did their part in getting us into this mess, so why are we paying them so generously to not take part in getting us out of it?
If you haven’t bookmarked CalWatchdog yet, you should. It’s a continuing source of good stuff on Crazifornia.
California’s Crippling Brain-Drain
Dec 5th
Three articles caught my eye this morning in the Orange County Register, and what a tale they tell!
The first article said that Donald Lamm, 57, has announced his retirement as City Manager of Westminster, an Orange County city of 88,000, where he was taking down a $207,000 a year salary. Lamm complained about the hours required to manage the city – which is hardly a Newark NJ or Los Angeles – and said he was going to start his own business. As the owner of a small business myself, I’m not sure he’ll be happy about the hours required for his new endeavor.
The second article said David Freeland has announced his retirement as Deputy Police Chief of Irvine, which is routinely rated as one of the safest large cities (pop. 208,000) in America. We can therefore guess that his 32 years with Irvine PD have probably not been rife with high-risk situations that are used to justify earlier retirement ages for public safety workers – although he did suffer severe injuries from an on-duty car accident and headed the SWAT squad for awhile. Freeland, 59, appears to have been paid close to $200,000 a year. Now he plans to teach martial arts, write a book and of course spend time with his family.
Freedland and Lamm are something of anomalies in California’s public sector, since the deputy chief worked four years longer than he to in order to get his maximum pension, and the city manager stayed an extra two years.
Or to put into the terms of the entrepreneurial private sector, Freedland left at least 11 good, productive years on the table, and Lamm left at least 13 – assuming entrepreneurs retire at 70, which is generous given what’s typical nowadays, which I’ll get to in a moment. The cities had invested much in their expertise, not just paying their salaries year after year, but also spending generously to train them. They were at the top of their games, in a position to pay Irvine and Westminster back handsomely on their investments, but instead they took their chips and left their cities.
And they had plenty of chips to take with them, given the generous public employee pensions, which currently have mounted a half-trillion-dollar unfunded liability for the state. Both men will receive annual income from their pensions roughly equal to their last-year salary, for life. No wonder most public employees retire the moment they’re fully vested.
And that brings us to the third article, about how debt is forcing Baby Boomers to reconsider retirement. (Here’s the link to the original article, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.) The article shows how many private sector retirees are looking at bankruptcy as their only retirement option, and says:
“We may be entering several generations of a depression era for future U.S. retirees,” said Thomas J. Mackell, former chairman of the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank.
“The problem is 50 percent of baby boomers are ill-prepared financially to retire,” he said. “They just don’t have enough money, and many of them are in debt.”
Things weren’t great even before the financial slump of the last two years. Then the economic downturn hit older people hard, based on research funded by the state’s economic development department, making an already challenging situation that much more difficult.
For a variety of reasons — from medical bills to limited retirement income to relatives in need — a growing number of older people have been turning to the bankruptcy courts for relief in recent years. …
“With the job environment the way it is and the problems people age 50 and over are having finding employment, the continuation of their problems could increase dramatically if the economy doesn’t turn around,” [bankruptcy attorney Theodore Connolly] said.
Overall, a lot of factors out of retirees’ control are working against them.
The major asset many had expected to rely on in their retirement — their home — is decreasing in value. They may have counted on the equity carrying them through lean times or being able to sell it at a nice profit during retirement.
Whatever they’ve invested in the stock market may not be growing at the rate they expected, and whatever retirement income stream they were counting on from bank CDs and government bonds has been reduced to a mere trickle.
No such worries will plague Freedland and Lamm, or any of the other thousands of California public employees who will leave working behind this year to enjoy many, many golden years at the people’s expense. Since they enjoy fixed benefits, not fixed contributions, they know they’ll be covered no matter what the economy does.
So we have public employees retiring in their 50s to follow their dreams, while those in the private sector – who paid the salaries of Freedland, Lamm and the others – are looking down the barrel of something that feels very much like a Great Depression, with no fixed, permanent public benefit awaiting them.
You’d think the very least our public sector cohorts could do would be to give their all for another decade or so, since, given how things are in California, it’s going to require all the expertise we’ve got to get through the next decade. They did their part in getting us into this mess, but we’re paying them to not take part in getting us out of it.
