The public sector cannot support unions by its very nature, and governments definitely cannot be trusted to fund pensions or healthcare. All you have to do is look at what is going on all over the country. It is plain and simple. Governments can and do ignore the laws they place upon private sector pension funds. In 2012 The U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee released a report that showed the 50 state governments collectively have 2.4 trillion dollars in unfunded pension liabilities. This accounts for over half of the cumulative debt of the 50 states.
These numbers, mind you, only includes state pensions, not the pensions of cities. A recent Pew Research report using numbers from 2009 gave the chilling truth about the pension debt of cities like Atlanta (1.27 billion), Baltimore (678 million), Boston (1.24 billion), Chicago (11.9 billion), Houston (2.52 billion), Los Angeles (3.82 billion), New York (44.15 billion), Philadelphia (6.93 billion), Phoenix (1.39) billion, Portland (OR) (2.72 billion) and San Diego (2.1 billion). These cities, and the states as well, have even worse records on funding the healthcare of retirees.
The most terrifying part is that these numbers are still skyrocketing. If you’ve opened a newspaper in the last few days you know that Moody’s downgraded Chicago’s credit rating again, due to the now reported 19 billion dollars in pension debt.
If any private pension fund ran up these sorts of debts, the corporation would be destroyed and the board would be sent to jail. Therefore, the only way to fix our pension woes is to turn over that money to private groups, who have a far better record of returns, and who can easily be held accountable for their misuse of funds by the proper authorities.
And that is the only solution, the only way to keep all our large cities from turning into Detroit, a cesspool of government stupidity, filled with politicians protecting themselves and special interests at our cost. Since it is impossible to keep these sorts of leeches out of the public sector, our only choice is to take away their money. The longer we wait to do this, the worse things will be.
