Edward Ring writes for American Greatness about a disturbing development on the left coast.
In a display of power that ought to be used for public benefit, California’s public servants have instead prioritized their personal financial interests. Unions representing the state’s police and firefighters pushed a bill through the state legislature that will increase their pension benefits, despite the state’s pension systems barely achieving solvency thanks to critical reforms passed in 2012 combined with a stock market that has roared almost continuously since 2009.
To suggest that the American stock market will never end what is—notwithstanding a brief dip during the COVID era—one of the longest bull runs in history is to deny reality. But in a unanimous 33-0 vote in the state senate and a nearly unanimous 70-2 vote in the state assembly, denying economic reality is exactly what California’s legislators did. Assembly Bill 1383 will, as even California’s liberal political news site CalMatters put it, “let first responders retire earlier and with more money.”
We’ve seen this scenario once before and should have learned. In 1999, during the last heady moments of the internet-fueled stock market bubble (it burst in March 2000), public safety unions rammed through the California state legislature Senate Bill 400, which would allow them to “retire earlier and with more money.” Then, even as the internet bubble burst and the market crashed, every other public sector union pushed through similar legislation or “negotiated” similar benefit enhancements. They rolled through every state, city, and county agency in the state. And within a few years, California’s taxpayers were on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars in unfunded pension liabilities, with no end in sight. …
… Pension payments are breaking state and municipal budgets across California. It got so bad that in 2012, Governor Jerry Brown used all his political power to engineer a comprehensive pension reform, the Public Employee Pension Reform Act (PEPRA), through the state legislature. We may criticize Brown for many things, but he had the brains and the leadership skill to address what had become a statewide crisis.
