NYCity Pensions Take II

    Sigh. Not that I expected the Times to adjust its coverage of the NY City pensions situation. But...can't the reporters at least acknowledge that the serious fiscal situation cities and states are in come in large part from the shredding of a progressive taxation system, i.e., that the rich and corporations pay so little in taxes that the rest of us are left to bear the burden--and, then, of course cities face shortfalls.

    If you're interested, you can read the next installment in the two-part series which details deals made between some unions, the governor and the legislature that have enhanced pension benefits.

Comments

[el cabrero]

Speaking of pensions, you may want to check out Malcolm Gladwell's article in the latest New Yorker. Short version: Walter Reuther was right.

[anon]

Glad to see the article in the Times today. Hopefully this will swing some more name ID and support your way.

[what now toons]

Bush recently spoke about getting the job done, and the job they're doing, and some other meaningless gibberish using the word job. Jobs, jobs, jobs, sounds to me the Repugnant party is getting ready for Labor Day. Then they'll come out and say how many bogus jobs they're creating, when the real job is for them to take us all for all we've got. Yeah that's they're job, and they're laughing all the way to the bank. My latest cartoon deals with the current state of America's Labor force, and the CEO's that are sucking it dry.
www.whatnowtoons.com

[anon]

i read the new yorker piece. i don't buy the thing about an industry's dependency ratio hurting their ability to pay pensions and health care to retirees.

And the steelmaking process changed. Instead of laboriously making steel from scratch, with coke and iron ore, factories increasingly just melted down scrap metal. The open-hearth furnace was replaced with the basic oxygen furnace, which could make the same amount of steel in about a tenth of the time. Steelmakers switched to continuous casting, which meant that you skipped the ingot phase altogether and poured your steel products directly out of the furnace. As a result, steelmakers like Bethlehem were no longer hiring young workers to replace the people who retired. They were laying people off by the thousands. But every time they laid off another employee they turned a money-making steelworker into a money-losing retiree—and their dependency ratio got a little worse.

...

What happened to Bethlehem, of course, is what happened throughout American industry in the postwar period. Technology led to great advances in productivity, so that when the bulge of workers hired in the middle of the century retired and began drawing pensions, there was no one replacing them in the workforce. General Motors today makes more cars and trucks than it did in the early nineteen-sixties, but it does so with about a third of the employees.

if productivity is going up and an industry is hiring less people to produce the same amount of stuff, then assuming that all else is equal (mainly, the profits) the industry should have more than enough money to pay the health care and pensions of retired workers, regardless of the "dependency ratio." i agree that we should ideally have national health insurance and national pensions, however this reasoning is bogus.