Outrageous benefits come at taxpayers expense

From the BCCT.

Outrageous benefits come at taxpayers expense
Bucks County Courier Times

Your editorial on Pennsylvania state pensions is so true and on target. The cost of the outrageous pension increases that our protected criminal class (a.k.a. the state Legislature) gave themselves in 2001 is coming home to roost. The Legislature took a 50 percent pension increase and gave the teachers, the most influential group in the Legislature, a 25 percent increase as the price for its own increase.

On Dec. 11, Pennsbury's administration provided the board and community with a five-year projection of the district's financial condition using data provided before the latest information from the Teachers' Retirement System estimating that pension costs will be 16.4 percent of salaries in 2012-13 vs. 4.7 percent in the coming year.

The numbers provided by Pennsbury's administration presented the board with frightening options. I have requested a new five-year projection based on the Retirement' System's latest projections and this projection can only be more frightening. The options will be: double-digit tax increases; larger class sizes; draconian cuts in bus service and student activities or some combination thereof.

When these are combined with the ever-increasing unfunded mandates on special education and other things, the money put into educating non-special education children (the average reader's children) will shrink more while the privileged will get their pensions and the legislators will get their lifetime health benefits at no cost.

There are two ways to change this picture. One requires a change in the state Constitution so these outrageous benefits can be scaled back. The other would be for the state to declare bankruptcy. I suppose two more solutions could be a Dow Jones average of 25,000 or a bailout from the federal government. The last two are out of our control.

Many of us will have gone bankrupt along with the state should that be the path. The only reasonable path to help all of us is to change the Constitution so public sector pensions mirror those of the taxpayers. I am not saying that public employees do not deserve pensions but the taxpayer does not deserve being forced into bankruptcy to provide them.

The solution to the problem is in the hands of those who created it. Will the Legislature step up and solve this problem? Not unless each of us forces the issue and demands reform.

Richard B. Johnson
Pennsbury school director Region 3