Madison - Acting with unusual speed, the state Supreme Court on Tuesday reinstated Gov. Scott Walker's plan to all but end collective bargaining for tens of thousands of public workers.

The court found a committee of lawmakers was not subject to the state's open meetings law, and so did not violate that law when they hastily approved the measure and made it possible for the Senate to take it up. In doing so, the Supreme Court overruled a Dane County judge who had struck down the legislation, ending one challenge to the law even as new challenges are likely to emerge.

The majority opinion was by Justices Michael Gableman, David Prosser, Patience Roggensack and Annette Ziegler. The other three justices - Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson and Justices Ann Walsh Bradley and N. Patrick Crooks - concurred in part and dissented in part.

The opinion voided all orders in the case from the lower court. It came just before 5 p.m., sparing Republicans who control the Legislature from taking up the contentious issue of collective bargaining again.

Legislative leaders had said they would have inserted the limits on collective bargaining into the state budget late Tuesday if the court hadn't acted by then. But the high court ruled just before that budget debate was to begin.

The Assembly is to take up the budget Tuesday night.

The court ruled that Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi's ruling, which had held up implementation of the collective bargaining law, was void ab initio, or invalid from the outset.

In its decision, the state's high court concluded that "choices about what [sic] laws represent wise public policy for the state of Wisconsin are not within the constitutional purview of the courts."

This just in: @PositiveEnerG: Wisconsin State Senate has just passed conceal carry bill by 25-8 vote

Ace has broken out the Flaming Honey Badger for this one.

And check out Jeff, whose update covers the most important aspect of this finally happy travesty.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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So let's kick it.

CALIFORNIA
This story is so bad, it gets top billing:

Two high-ranking officials at the Orange County Employees Retirement System have been placed on paid leave in connection with a $228 million mistake that has resulted in multi-million dollar pension catch-up bills for agencies countywide.

In particular, the Orange County Fire Authority has been handed a catch-up bill of $76 million – the amount of contributions that went uncollected for eight years for “special pay” stipends for paramedics, EMT’s, and others with specialized jobs.

“To get a bill like that was devastating,” said Joe Kerr, president of the 800-member Orange County Professional Firefighters. “How could this oversight have gone on for so many years?”

OCERS has agreed to let the firefighters pay the bill over a 25-year period, at $4.5 million a year, beginning in July, said Lori Zeller, OCFA assistant chief of business services.

Now, I've made substantial errors in my time, but nothing like that. That took some doing. I have a feeling that more than those two will end up gone by the time that mess is cleaned up. If it gets cleaned up. This has been going on since 2003, it seems.

This next one is actually more important, and I will write a separate post on this later....in my copious free time. Ha. This is the Little Hoover Commission reviewing public pensions in California:

But a new report from the Little Hoover Commission in Sacramento makes a more troubling point: Many state and local government employees have been promised pensions that the public couldn't have afforded even had there been no crash.

The commission's analysis of the problem is hotly disputed by union leaders, who contend that the financial woes of pension funds have been overblown. The commission's recommendations are equally controversial: Among other things, it urges state lawmakers to roll back the future benefits that current public employees can accrue, raise the retirement age and require employees to cover more pension costs. Given that state courts have rejected previous attempts to alter the pensions already promised to current workers, the commission's recommendation amounts to a Hail Mary pass. Yet it's one worth throwing.

Here's a link to the full report, and a short overview of the report's contents. Across the pond is a similar study, with more incendiary language -- calling public pensions "Madoff-style pyramids". And yet another report -- most public pension plans are in crisis.

Look. The unions had better think about what they're going to be able to live with, b/c "I've got mine" ain't going to work. They don't got theirs til all the cash is in hand, and they're dead, no longer receiving pension payments. That stuff can be taken away, as a practical matter, at any time.

States cannot run the printing presses. The money can, indeed, run out. Current retirees, forget about current employees, can get dinged in a major way.

Many states and cities are making changes right now to try to make sure the promises might actually have a chance of being achieved. And that may involve a variety of benefit haircuts, amongst other things.

Some people are still in denial about these possibilities. "It's illegal!" they cry. Ask the retirees of Prichard, Alabama if legality pays their pensions. Because they've gotten nothing since 2009.

So quit having the vapors over changing benefits for current employees and thinking there must be some more rich people to tax. It can, and will, get much worse than that.

That's it for my commentary. Now it's time for the link explosion.

Charter amendment in L.A. to roll back public safety benefits.

Showdown brewing over CA state employee pensions.

Employee pensions much higher than advertised.

A rundown of the proposals Brown had made during his gubernatorial campaign.

Tim Cavanaugh from Reason on how public pensions killed California. More on pensions bankrupting California.

Reform sought by Orange County Republicans...including the newly popular "Let's rescind collective bargaining!" Kevin Williamson explains that it's not the collective bargaining that makes for the awful amounts of public employee benefits, but the mere political existence of public employee unions. Back to those O.C. pols: more coverage of their proposals. And yet more coverage.

Considering defined contribution plans for public safety workers in San Diego.

Pension crisis? What pension crisis? Almost 200 California plans raise benefits.

FLORIDA

Revision to Florida pension bill, requiring more employee contributions as part of Governor Scott's push to reform Florida pensions. There have been lots of editorials supporting Scott's proposed changes. Scott compared the Florida situation to Social Security problems.

Evidently, part-timers had been getting pensions from Florida.

Looking at pension reform choices in FL. More considering what needs to be done in Florida.

Analysts say Florida fund is okey-dokey. So...have they fixed that "sole trustee" issue, yet? More on that analysis.

RHODE ISLAND

Rhode Island has highest unfunded pension liability per capita

PBS Newshour coverage of the Rhode Island incipient pension disaster

A tale of Providential double-dipping.

More on Rhode Island's pension squeeze.

MISSISSIPPI

Mississippi puts off increasing pension fund contributions

VIRGINIA

Plan to divert school funds to pension funds not popular

NEW YORK

Reminder that Cuomo said he wants to tackle pensions. He's been pretty quiet lately, hasn't he?

Mayor Bloomberg also proposed pension cuts, noting that the city has no power in negotiating those.

NEW JERSEY

It's the heavyweight champeen Gov. Christie in this corner against flyweight MD Gov. O'Malley, duking it out over pension reform.

Massive head for the exits in NJ... might as well collect benefits before the money runs out.

Christie says NJ pensions will be broke by 2020 without reform. I guess he's been reading John Bury. Even with reforms, the future isn't bright.

D.C.

D.C. pensions need reform, too.

WISCONSIN (v. MINNESOTA)

A comparison of what WI and MI employees pay for their pensions.

More on the Wisconsin employee benefits and collective bargaining.

Wisconsin's pension fund one of the financially healthiest in the country.

OHIO

Burden of pension reforms to be put on employees for Ohio's five pension plans.

Keep an eye on this court case about retiree health benefits....because post-retirement healthcare is considered one of the weakest benefits in most public employee benefits packages, because almost all of that is pay-as-you-go -- and that's most definitely =not= sustainable.

NEW HAMPSHIRE

GOP proposals for NH pension reforms.

Public employees protest pension reforms.

ILLINOIS

Governor claims that Illinois pensions won't need federal bailout. HA HA HA. Wow, he's getting good at that stand-up act.

TEXAS

Teacher pension plan working against spiking- the practicing of goosing the final year salary to get a higher pension payout.

GENERAL ISSUES

And now, in the interest of some balance, something from a Teamsters leader.

And another pro-public employee point-of-view...it's actually reasonable, though. You should read this one.

The problem is that the blame game doesn't get the pensions paid. Progressives try to gin up a class war and find the haves v. have-nots weren't the classes they had in mind.

The best case scenario at this point for many public employees is to end up in the same system as most private workers, and most will get at least some of the benefits originally promised them.

Prichard won't be the last case of a public pension going totally under and the retirees ending up with nothing. So people should make their plans accordingly.

Meep

Meep is a member of the Irish Catholic mafia, having a suspiciously high number of green-eyed, red-haired friends. While she doesn’t have red hair herself [except when she goes into the sun (rare for any vampire)], she does have green eyes. She’s a raving Papist and is a life actuary on the side [i.e., she counts dead people]. An amateur pain-in-the-ass [willing to go pro!], she likes covering retirement, mortality, math, and education issues.

Take a good hard look at the pictures above and below. Every one of them contains young children or adolescents wrongly recruited to carry the water of public employee unions here in the great state of Wisconsin. Looking at the above pre-printed signs, one might ask: "Stop the attack on Wisconsin families?  How about stopping the attack on Wisconsin taxpayers?"

Anyone watching the national news already knows that an ugly fight has unfolded in my home state between the public employee unions and the Republican governor and legislators elected in surprising numbers last November. I will leave the details to other sources since they are readily available. The long and short of it is, Wisconsin is dead broke, and Governor Scott Walker is looking to put an end to the gross fiscal mismanagement that got us to this bad, bad place.  One of the ways he aims to do that is to ask the state's public employees to start chipping in toward their benefits. They currently pay not one thin dime toward their pensions (for which there is zero vesting period) and a teeny, tiny little contribution toward their healthcare coverage. This would be bumped up to a 5.8 percent pension contribution (in line with the national average) and a 12 percent healthcare contribution (half the average paid by a private sector worker).

If you think the unions are unhappy about that, you should hear them on the following provisions:

Collective bargaining – The bill would make various changes to limit collective bargaining for most public employees to wages.  Total wage increases could not exceed a cap based on the consumer price index (CPI) unless approved by referendum.  Contracts would be limited to one year and wages would be frozen until the new contract is settled.  Collective bargaining units are required to take annual votes to maintain certification as a union.  Employers would be prohibited from collecting union dues and members of collective bargaining units would not be required to pay dues.  These changes take effect upon the expiration of existing contracts.  Local law enforcement and fire employees, and state troopers and inspectors would be exempt from these changes.

Let's be clear about what Governor Walker accomplishes via this bill, should it pass (and as of a couple of hours ago, the Joint Finance Committee had finally voted and moved the bill on to the full legislature):

• Cut Wisconsin's $136.7 million deficit for FY 2010-2011
• Save state employee jobs in order to keep people off unemployment in a challenging job market
• Keep total employee contributions far below what anyone in the private sector would pay
• Aim toward Right to Work instead of outright decertification of unions

Considering the level of fiscal and economic challenge Wisconsin now faces, you'd think union members might feel a bit grateful not to have to make far greater sacrifices...or lose their jobs altogether. Instead, they've gone completely bat$#!%. And they've dragged children of every age into their extended temper tantrum as they try to bully Republican legislators into giving in to the status quo Wisconsin can no longer afford. The don't seem to have any conception at all that Wisconsin swung from its typical purply-blue to a rosy shade of red last November.

I've made visits to the State Capitol Building for two days in a row now. On both days, hoards of children, from toddlers all the way up to high-schoolers, were present...many holding signs, others singing or chanting, some marching, a few running through the corridors shrieking...ALL unwittingly helping to propagate union lies about the bill and anger toward legislators standing for fiscal sanity and limited government. Like these girls for example who seemed so happy to be holding these signs:

Most of these kids were of school age.  On a weekday, that's exactly where they should have been.  In school.  Instead, they were being used by adults, many of them teachers who apparently have zero conscience but had the chutzpah to carry signs like the one below, saying, "Care about educators like they care about your child." Respectfully, if pimping children out to be used as the pawns of the unions is how teachers in this state "take care" of them, I wouldn't wish that sort of succor on anyone.

It hasn't stopped there, either. Wednesday, there was a massive "sick out" so that teachers could show up at the Capitol, many of them bringing students with them who should have been learning how to do an algebraic equation or diagram a sentence or memorize the Pre-Amble to the Constitution (I know, I know, I'm dreaming on that Constitution one). Instead, they all took a field trip to learn firsthand what recently-unelected Governor Jim Doyle last year so egregiously added to the state's public school curriculum: The History of Collective Bargaining, aka Traditional Methods of  Bullying the Guy that Signs Your Checks.

And that is exactly what makes me so furious about the use of children to further union ends. Teachers, in particular, are grossly abusing a massive power differential and an inherent trust in their relationship with students to further their own ends. They are telling lies in order to get these students to sing and dance to their tune.

They've told kids that programs they love at school will be cut. (No school cuts are on the table in this bill).

They've told students that pension funds would be taken away from teachers who'd saved their whole lives. (There are zero retroactive cuts in the bill, particularly any that would violate the state's fiduciary responsibilities).

They've screamed the message to children that collective bargaining rights are being taken away. (Unions will simply have to take a vote every year to re-certify and allow individuals to choose whether they want to be represented by the union or not.)

All of this falsehood being pumped to impressionable minds who have no reason to doubt the people they so easily look up to as role models.  And for what?  Because teachers, along with other public employee unions don't want to contribute to fixing a massive fiscal problem that financing their benefits over the years has helped to create. There is no, "Kids, we've had it golden for a long time, but there comes a day when you have to take responsibility." Now THAT is what I would call honorable teaching: Giving kids a view of how things work in the real world. Showing them how to accept difficulties in life and move forward in spite of them. Giving them a true sense of even the crappy, devalued dollar we now have.

Instead, they're dragging kids as pawns into a labor protest, teaching them to feel entitled, showing them how to throw a massive and ugly public temper tantrum if you're not getting what you want, and modeling how to intimidate people who won't cede the road entire to you. Nice...

For the past two nights, students in Baraboo were up marching around the town square in protest of teachers losing pay and collective bargaining rights.  Yesterday afternoon, there was a student/teacher walkout in that same town. As of this morning, a huge rash of school districts all over the state---Platteville, Racine, Madison, De Forest, Edgerton, Lodi, Waunakee, you name it---are closed as a result of high teacher absences and an inability to cover them with enough substitutes. You can bet, students will once again be a prominent percentage of the crowd again this morning, with the vote being taken around 11am.

I shudder to think that kids may have been in the mobs that showed up at the homes of Republican legislators who were being picketed over the past few days. I don't know if there were children there or not, because I wasn't there, but based on what I'm seeing everywhere else, and the ways children are being used to do the union's heavy lifting, I frankly wouldn't be at all surprised. Abysmal...

But it's "all about the kids," right...?  That's what the teachers keep disingenuously telling us, anyway.

Teachers and other public-employee union members and leaders ought to be heartily ashamed of themselves for way they are lying to and using these children, who are not getting an honest picture of this situation.  Nor are they getting the education they deserve...the education that will serve them out in the real world. That bringing this fight first into the classroom, and then taking the classroom out into the street, is not at present a fireable offense...?  Well, it damned well oughta be.

And that is all I have to say about that. Back to the Capitol I go for what ought to be another very dismal day in education in Wisconsin.

Kirsten

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The hometown Steelers got to the Super Bowl with a disciplined defense and flexible offense. The city fathers, on the other hand, will need a Hail Mary pass to salvage Pittsburgh's pension system.

By relying on outdated actuarial tables, making only minimum payments, and failing to limit benefits as the number of active workers paying into the plans fell, Pittsburgh has accumulated a $700 million unfunded liability, and its 29.5% funding level is among the lowest in the U.S.

Well, I'm sure taxation will help.... except that 50% of the taxes were already going to debt service + retiree benefits, and now they've got to devote 70%; the property tax base ain't so hot as 40% of the land is held by nontaxable entities; and the human tax base ain't so hot as the demographics suck -- one of the "oldest" cities out there. Read the whole article.

Still no answer as to what that calculation error was earlier.

Wisconsin's situation is a little less "colorful":

Walker said he is trying to help municipalities duplicate his cost-cutting efforts at the state level. In his State of the State speech Tuesday, he called for state employees to contribute 5 percent of their salaries toward their pensions and pay a 12 percent premium for health care coverage.

That's pretty much par-for-the-course nowadays.

Not really Super Bowl-related, but gotta share a little actuary love [because we get the love so infrequently. You're gonna die! You're gonna outlive your money! You're gonna pay a lot for that health insurance! ... why wouldn't people love us?]

Ryan’s breakthrough as author of the Roadmap was a direct result of his becoming the ranking Republican member on the budget committee in 2007. This gave him a staff of professionals and access to actuaries at the Congressional Budget Office, Treasury Department, and Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“Only after I became a ranking member could I get the actuaries to do all this scoring for me,” Ryan says. “They don’t just do this for everybody in Congress.” The Roadmap would reform Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the tax code, and the health care system. Without credible numbers on its fiscal effects and its cost, Ryan’s plan for restraining spending and wiping out the national debt would be purely abstract and easy to ignore. Now it’s front and center, the most important Republican policy document in decades.

Ryan relishes the company of actuaries. “I’ve gotten to know them,” he says. “It’s actually the highlight of my day when I meet with actuaries. I love those meetings. That’s the most interesting way I spend my time up here.”

Go out there and spread that actuary love.... or watch a football game. It's your choice.

Meep

Meep is a member of the Irish Catholic mafia, having a suspiciously high number of green-eyed, red-haired friends. While she doesn’t have red hair herself [except when she goes into the sun (rare for any vampire)], she does have green eyes. She’s a raving Papist and is a life actuary on the side [i.e., she counts dead people]. An amateur pain-in-the-ass [willing to go pro!], she likes covering retirement, mortality, math, and education issues.

DECEMBER 1--A Wisconsin teenager who described herself as a "skank agent" is facing felony charges for allegedly using Craigslist to rob prospective johns looking for sex. According to a Circuit Court complaint filed yesterday, Samantha Stubbe, 17, last month placed an ad in the online classified site's "Adult Gigs" section offering sexual favors in return for an apartment. After men were lured to a Fond du Lac motel for a purported liaison, Stubbe's male friends attacked them and stole their money. Stubbe, pictured below in the mug shot at right, was aided in the scheme by Stevi Smet, 18, who served as the female decoy outside the motel. Smet is pictured below at left. When questioned by police, Stubbe admitted orchestrating the strong-arm robbery scheme, but told Detective Steve Kaufman that "she would not consider herself a pimp but a 'skank agent,' meaning that she was an agent with skanky friends." Since state criminal codes do not address skank agentry, Stubbe was charged with soliciting prostitution and armed robbery. Smet, also charged with armed robbery, is facing a prostitution rap for allegedly having sex with a man who answered the Craigslist ad. The man, 19, told cops that he paid for Smet's services with a $175 check.

Left: Skank, Right: Skank Agent

(via The Smoking Gun)

I know I'm a bleeding heart, but I feel kind of sorry for these young idiots.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

Website - More Posts