<p>It’s just an opinion as to public sentiment and it’s effect on possible outcomes, sally… no real reason to waste so much effort articulating where you disagree with it. :-* </p>
<p>catahoula, all anyone needs to do is look at the threads you have started to see that you are here with an agenda. </p>
<p>I wasn’t aware that a somewhat dependable outlook on subjects was a disqualifier for posting, sally. </p>
<p>Send me something in the mail, detailing it, and I promise to look it over. Otherwise, we’ll just have to get along best we can. Sans the personal attacks, if you don’t mind.</p>
<p>Post away, catahoula. No one is censoring (or personally attacking) you here. And you have every right to your conspiracy theories, even though others may disagree with them. </p>
<p>Gracias, sally, for the permission and… keep that hat handy.</p>
<p>
They don’t lobby on compensation issues? In the case of Illinois?</p>
<p>
I gathered from your earlier post that they recognized there was a problem back in 1970. Not exactly helpful to the argument they haven’t been complicit in the state’s folly, just that they expected someone else to make it right.</p>
<p>1970 was the state’s constitutional convention. The constitutional amendment to which I refer, “membership in a pension is an enforceable contract, the benefits of which shall not be diminished, or impaired.” Was placed on the ballot and the voters of Illinois approved it, thus making it part of our constitution, and placing it above base political considerations, so I guess the entirety of the state’s voting population is “complicit”. </p>
<p>" Not exactly helpful to the argument they haven’t been complicit in the state’s folly, just that they expected someone else to make it right."
I’m not sure what you mean here. I don’t call it complicit when there were several lawsuits, it went to the state Supreme Court, and it was an issue in every gubernatorial election. There are people who are single issue voters on many topics, but funding the pensions is not one of those issues. Just because people lose an argument doesn’t make them complicit. </p>
<p>As for expecting someone else to make it right, again, I don’t know what you mean. The teachers, police, and state employees agreed to pay more into their pensions, and state workers accepted higher medical costs, all to make it economically feasible for the state to fund the pensions. Now the state won’t fund the pensions. How is that “expecting someone else to make it right”? </p>
<p>State workers have taken legal measures to solve the problem, they’ve taken pay cuts to solve the problem. Now you want them to accept the blame?</p>
<p>Hence my use of the word “cynical.”</p>
<p>There’s no doubt that this fiscal mess in Illinois is ultimately the responsibility of voters who did not vote for, and demand, long-term economic planning from our leaders. They were crummy, but they work for us. This wasn’t secret embezzlement; it was public knowledge that the pensions were underfunded. But we didn’t choose either to increase revenues or cut services. We decided, collectively, to worry about it later. Procrastination is a very common human failing on both the individual and aggregate level.</p>
<p>(I have heard “Illinoise” from a few less educated natives.)</p>
<p>The last two or three governors of Illinois are serving time for corruption. When people like that are elected…</p>
<p>Are there any states that HAVEN’T had corrupt governors?</p>
<p>Illinois may be the worst but we also have:
Bob McDonnell (VA)–convicted today
Rick Perry (TX)–under indictment
Scott Walker (WI)–two John Doe investigations
Rick Scott (FL)–Medicare fraud when he was a hospital executive</p>
<p>I am sure there are more but those are the ones that come to mind.</p>
<p>
My initial post was about teachers and their unions, as have been all the subsequent ones, hayden. If that wasn’t clear, my apologies. I’ll also confess I neither read the link in the OP or did any googling until today… just posted after reading Balthezar’s first one.</p>
<p>(Which makes the ‘tinfoil hat’ riff really puzzling, sally305, since… after reading the OP’s link and doing that googling I find my observation wasn’t original at all… sigh. Chances are, a lot of the folks you grocery shop subscribe to the same ‘conspiracy theories’ which might mean you’re the one on the outside looking in.)</p>
<p>hayden:</p>
<p>Coupled with the knowledge that a constitutional amendment guaranteed a third party would make those pensions whole, I’d be likely to say that any behavior (lobbying, for instance) that increased the debt over what might have been originally anticipated, or diverted funds that might have been applied to it, would constitute compliance in the mess that finally fell out on the floor.</p>
<p>That the state was the one not to allocate money to the funds - because they were increasing funding for schools and more teachers, for instance - doesn’t absolve unions that were lobbying for that exact thing. Same for any bargaining that enabled the kinds of extraordinary payouts that decrease available monies for the not-yet-retired.</p>
<p>There is no such constitutional amendment in the state I’m referring to. I can’t speak to IL. </p>
<p>Secondly, in this state, state funds don’t pay for schools or teacher salaries / medical benefits. Those are paid by local property taxes. The state does pay for pensions, at least theoretically. </p>
<p>The pensions include people in unions and people who are not unionized. </p>
<p>Conversational drift is responsible for as much disagreement as anything else. </p>