You're wasting your time. The 3 card monte scammers on Smith Hill will be reamortizing if not this year then next.
Heck, they won't even curb the damn COLA's much less the benefit.
LOL

Progressives-the dumbest people on the planet.

Mr. Morse says, "The lesson, as always, is that progressives and public finance don't mix." So he says.

The problem is that public finance and retrogressives like Mr. Morse need to be introduced to one another. It won't happen because he is a one trick pony who prances to one tune only, "Unions are bad."

So this thread is more of the same from Morse. Kill the unions and everything will be fine in these United States and leave the working class to the tender hands of our benevolent captains of industry.

What oil spill? Cut the funds and let the industrial foxes guard the public hen house.
OldTimeLefty

Ironic that you bring up the issue of pollution as if it is a private phenomenon, OldTimeLefty. Every reputable economist knows that the worst polluter in the entire world is the US government. Oops, that doesn't jive with the progressive story. Quick, hire Pat "Two Gun" Crowley or Tom "The Illusionist" Sgouros to doctor some numbers and explain it away.

www.liberateri.com

Does anyone really believe that the General Assembly clowns in the public sector union circus, the same hacks who blew through the tobacco money and increased their budget by 13% just last June, aren't going to do the irresponsible, kick the can down the road thing and re-amortize?

OTL,

Whether a portion of retirement fund contributions come from union members or not, money-out has to equal money-in plus investment growth, or else a retirement plan doesn't work. The point of this post is that reamortizing the pension will force a big chunk of the money-in needed to pay for mistakes made by this generation and generations prior to come from people earning paychecks 20-30 years from now -- many of whom haven't even been born yet. Your kind of mentality that it is somehow anti-union to discuss basic facts like these has played a large part in creating this state's financial mess.

I'm against reamortization because it's a 'last resort' move with long-term consequences, and we're not at 'last resort' in terms of trimming the budget. There are a -lot- of ways we could cut the budget without making this drastic move.

We have to accept the fact that Rhode Island will have either less services or higher taxes for a long time in order to make up this hole we've dug ourselves into. I'm not willing to refinance a debt that won't be paid until I'm almost sixty.

Also, the big risk here is that we'll re-amortize the payments this year, then do it again next year, and again, ad-infinitum. I don't want my legislators thinking that they can magically wave their problems away for some future generation to deal with.

"it is somehow anti-union to discuss basic facts"

Actually, what is anti-union is the legion of General Assembly members who, for the past three decades, refused to fund the pensions that they themselves had promised.

>>We have to accept the fact that Rhode Island will have either less services or higher taxes for a long time in order to make up this hole we've dug ourselves into.

How about the better alternative: the public sector employees will have to accept that fact that they'll have to live with lower compensation (pay, benefits and post-retirement benefits) ... and the welfare queens will have to accept the fact that the party's over and Rhode Island will no longer be the welfare plantation of choice?

Ragin, those are measures I count under 'fewer services'. I think it's actually rather unlikely to get a lot of concessions on a per-worker basis, so I'm imagining using some methods to have fewer state and local employees.

The principal here is clear.

The issue at hand is the compensation of, say, police officers, fire fighters and teachers. Let's look back to say, 1997. When these public sector professionals that year delivered their services, the government, and us indirectly as taxpayers, in the form of salaries paid and future benefits earned (pension and post retirement health care). On the principal that the people incurring the expense should fully provide for it, rather than shifting it to future generations to pay (think of it as a free lunch), in 1997 we should have taxed ourselves to pay both their salaries and to make out contribution to the cost of their future pensions. Granted, the cost of the latter can only be estimated with some uncertainty, involving as it does estimates of future salary increases, years to retirement, years lived after retirement, future CPI inflation, future health care cost inflation, and future returns on amounts already invested in the past to cover the cost of services provided in the past.

But again, the general principle is clear. In 1997 the citizens who, through government, incurred those costs should have paid for them, via taxes that were used to pay salaries and fund future benefits. We here in 2010 should not be picking up their tab.

But that is exactly what we are asking our own children and grandchildren to do via reamortization.

Of course, if we all know that there will never be enough in the way of taxes or investment earnings to cover the future tab, then public sector pensions are nothing more or less than yet another Ponzi scheme. Time will tell, I guess.

Final point: What too many public sector employees fail to fully comprehend is that if they had been giving the taxpayers superior value for money all along in the form of outcomes and delivery efficiency, then the current discussion would likely be a wholly different one.

"Final point: What too many public sector employees fail to fully comprehend is that if they had been giving the taxpayers superior value for money all along in the form of outcomes and delivery efficiency, then the current discussion would likely be a wholly different one."

The only way this discussion would be different would be if the "taxpayers" no longer paid taxes.