Hey, teachers, cops, etc. -- Mitch McConnell wants your job, pension. Will he kill the GOP instead?

[applegrove]

Hey, teachers, cops, etc. — Mitch McConnell wants your job, pension. Will he kill the GOP instead? | Will Bunch

Updated: April 26, 2020 - 12:53 PM

Will Bunch | @will_bunch |[e-mail]

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/mitch-mcconnell-let-states-go-bankrupt-pensions-layoffs-20200426.html

"SNIP,,,,

It’s been a generation since the right-wing activist Grover Norquist said his movement’s goal wasn’t to eliminate government but merely to “shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub.” Since then, the failure of a downsized and disinterested government to respond to crises like Hurricane Katrina seemed to have proved the empty fallacy of those words. And today, you’d think the federal government’s botched-in-every-way response to the coronavirus would be the exclamation point. Instead, we find Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, his clothes soaking wet, and his thumbprints buried deeply around the neck of the nearly departed.

It’s feels like a case of political suicide, that McConnell and some of his GOP colleagues are so wedded to an anti-government philosophy that — even in the nation’s biggest crisis since World War II — they’re willing to drink the Clorox. The lack of political common sense seems stunning. The nation’s unemployment rate right now seems somewhere in the 15-20% — i.e., Great Depression II — level, so laying off middle-class government workers in the fall of a presidential election year seems pretty self-destructive. The apparent lack of any real game plan here even caused me last week to ask my Twitter followers what theythought is going on here. Some ideas:

Short-term politics. The “best-case” scenario is that McConnell is playing within the bounds of normalized political cynicism, that at some point he’ll at least hear the pleas of suffering red state governors and grant some federal relief, even if it’s less than the $700 million sought by Democrats. Even if this is the case, the final package — if recent history is any guide — will be less than what these governments need, and it will be used as leverage to squeeze even more dollars out for McConnell’s true patrons, the millionaires and corporations that have done so well in the first four bills.

“Sado-populism?” This is the theory popularized by the historian Timothy Snyder and others that right-wing populist movements can’t deliver on their political promises (or, in the case of America’s GOP, remain wedded in reality to monied elites) and so they instead deliver pain and retain power by blaming the new suffering on someone else — immigrants, or the undeserving poor, or Democrats, or unions, or some combo. McConnell’s move certainly matches the motive of the fake-spontaneous “open up the economy” protests that have sought to make mostly Democratic governors the coronavirus villain instead of a mostly Republican federal government.

.....SNIP"

[dem4decades]

1. So many cops support the GOP, hope they're paying attention.

[brewens]

2. I was taunting a RW buddy that recently retired from the state of Idaho about pensions.

He retired a little early to "lock in" his benefits. He was worried they would make cuts. I piled on by saying they might just eliminate pensions altogether. All they have to do is say we can't afford it, we're broke. Then play the other taxpayers by saying, most of them don't have pensions, they can't afford higher taxes to pay for others retirements. That fired him up! The kind of thing he'd be for if it wasn't him.

Of course I'm not in favor of any of hat and didn't think they would, I was just yanking his chain. But now I'm not so sure. This virus may be a good excuse to try. That was last winter too, had nothing to do with what we have going on now.

[Igel]

4. In this case "yanking his chain" is just

being unnecessarily cruel.

It's like OASDI: There's money there, just not enough. Very often--which is what a lot of people want to forget about--pensions were in sorry shape before 2/20. Also very often--what people don't want to remember--is that when the stock market recovers, the pensions will largely recover from what happened this spring.

In other words, we forget the past and present as an unchanging fact that the pension funds are and always will be in the same state they are now.

They *were* in sorry shape before 2/20 for the same reasons I watched when I was at UCLA. They promise better benefits as part of contract negotiations; they take any bump up in the value of the pension as grounds that things will always be wonderful and cut the pension contributions; they make foolish decisions on investments; they don't raise pensions rates as necessary.

At UCLA they wanted faculty to retire. They said "full pension" and added years to an employee's tenure and age. 15 years' service and age 55 would get you benefits for somebody 20 years' service and age 65.

As a result of the '90s stock bubble the pension was overfunded. Immediately they gave everybody a 4% raise by not collecting the pension contribution.

When the bubble popped, they resented having to raise the contribution. Part was faculty--and part of the state's.

Then there were the protestors, saying to disinvest from certain industries. Profitable in terms of dividends? Sure. But who needs profit when you have morals.

Every one of those things was a choice with a predictable outcome. But every single choice was deemed correct because there was time to fix it. And when it came time to fix it, often there'd be a different administration, different regents on the board, and the old fallback--"Who could have predicted this?" No, that last bit wasn't right. "Who could have predicted this--I'll tell you, absolutely nobody predicted this--and if they say they did, they're liars and hate this fine institution and as governor/chair of the board I challenge anybody to prove that they predicted exactly this situation." Hard to get a word in edgewise before you're shamed and insulted if you dare say anything at the end.

This was Cali, and having their pension 30% underfunded last fall when they were crowing about their wonderful rainy-day fund was incongruous. Most states are in the same situation for the same reasons.

Houston's in pain because of this. It made big promises as part of contract negotiations--swapping out higher wages for better retirement benefits. Now they're being told they have to fund their benefits pool.

And the first thing Houston did was turn to the state, which said, "You made your bed, lie in it."

If they're not bailed out for being political and not being prudent, they'll have to choose: Full benefits funding as they draw down the pension fund or they pick a percentage of promised benefits that they pay.

Corporations did the big nasty of raiding pension funds prior to going belly up. I doubt that the courts would let governments do this.

[rickyhall]

3. I hope he kills the criminal GOP.