27 August 2010

Arnold Schwarzenegger: Public Pensions and Our Fiscal Future - WSJ.com

Arnold Schwarzenegger: Public Pensions and Our Fiscal Future - WSJ.com: "Public Pensions and Our Fiscal Future"
Few Californians in the private sector have $1 million in savings, but that's effectively the retirement account they guarantee to many government employees.

Hello Dear Reader!

Sable Crow is getting warmed up with the finance stuff! So I thought I'd share my latest finding with you. There's a great Opinion piece today in the Wall Street Journal. We have a major problem Dear Reader, which needs to be addressed.  Take a look at the graphic:


I fully support Arnold on this effort, while acknowledging the challenge he faces. Public entitlements, on both the state and Federal level, are the major problem of our generation. This isn't a moral argument--I'd love to get something for free, too. This is simply mathematical reality--there's no way to pay for all these promises.

We are about to set up a class structure in the US that will be very difficult to unwind. We will have the working class, and the retired class.

The retired class will be composed of entitled Baby Boomers who lavished themselves with promises, over-leveraged the economy, jerry-rigged their last years of employment to juice their already-swollen retirement benefits, and then retired early.

The working class, regardless of income level, will be those of us left holding the tab. It's like going to dinner with a big group (doesn't this always happen?) and someone is drinking cocktails, orders a bottle of wine, the most expensive thing on the menu to eat, brags about their latest international vacation, and then says at the end, "Shall we just split it evenly?"

I hate group dinners for that reason. My political feelings are identical.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Everyone likes something for free. The problem is that too many in our society have forgotten that someone, somewhere must pay for it. There's not some magical account out there somewhere at the end of a rainbow. The soon to be retired class was promised more than could ever be delivered. And the burden is squarely on our generation's shoulders.
Group dinners aren't so bad. I just tell the jerk 'no.' And if my tongue has been properly loosened by that point in the evening, I might calculate exactly why his request is rude and draw him up a bill of his own to compare to the rest of the table. Then again, I don't make it a habit to dine with such inconsiderate jerks.