Maybe some things just need to fail for the greater good.
Here’s a good example of a system that needs to fail because it’s consuming its public host. The parasite and the host can’t both survive.
Via Michael Graham, Massachusetts Unions Reach Their Ultimate Goal: More “Collecting” Than Working:
Does this sound a bit “Detroit-esque” to anyone else?
The MBTA Retirement Fund has more pensioners scooping up payouts than active workers paying into it, according to its own pension-pulling chief — a dangerous imbalance experts say could get worse because so many T staffers retired early.
The Herald reported yesterday that more than half of the 6,300-plus people receiving pensions from the T retired before the age of 60, and 35 percent — or 2,240 — left before 55, according to a massive database made public for the first time under a new law passed this summer.
By comparison, the T has roughly 6,200 active employees.
So you’ve got more people being paid not to work than you do people working. And that 6,200 number includes people on disability, by the way, so there are even FEWER actual workers.
Will the last MBTA employee actually showing up to earn a paycheck please turn out the lights when you leave?
Oh, and don’t forget my fellow private-sector workers. Our taxes just went up half- a-billion-dollars a YEAR to pay more into this scam of a system.
There’s a name for this problem: Detroit.
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Detroit…
Charlie LaDuff, Detroit icon/reporter, ran a piece Friday on the local news about Detroit voters.
As in, 108% of the entire population of Detroit is registered to vote.
“City Clerk Janice Winfrey did not respond to numerous phone calls or a visit to the Board of Elections. And curiously, Daniel Baxter, the director of the board of elections retired Friday morning.”
Quite the story, eh?
You know what didn’t even raise an eyebrow?
Daniel Baxter, the director of the board of elections retired Friday morning, at the age of 47.
http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/story/23096336/detroits-election-results-more-weird-math
Sounds like a death-spiral to me – I wonder what will they do, as ever-increasing taxes and regulations cause jobs to leave? The response of Dems in CA is to build a high-speed rail from Nowhere to the another Nowhere, as a way to “improve the infrastructure”.
Looks like the T will need more than a nickel increase, and Charlie could be stuck on it for a long, long time.
So what’s the difference between the MBTA and Social Security???
Oh pish posh!
All MA has to do is create their own miniFed and print their own currency. Call it “Local QE 101.”
Now go away and leave me alone… (burp)(hic)
s/MBA/MA Retiree
In epidemiology, it is know that diseases that kill the host too quickly don’t spread as fast and far as those that allow the host to circulate and infect others before dying. Unless there is a vector involved.
As relatively uninfected areas – right to work states, e.g. – note the death spiral of the blue states, they develop immune systems that should keep them safe. However, there are two deadly vectors out there, working cooperatively: the “Democratic” party and the NLRB.
As in all lethal diseases, one of the best plans of attack is to eliminate the vectors.
There is another factor in your metaphor. In an epidemic, the disease is usually fought [to greater or lesser effect] by the immune system in the infected individual. The immune system recognizes a threat and mobilizes the body’s defensive response. If the immune system has been corrupted or “turned”; there will be no defense.
I posit that the Republican Party is supposed to have the function of mobilizing opposition to the Left in our body politic; and has been corrupted and does not oppose the disease process. And in fact, they concentrate their efforts on suppressing any opposition by conservatives.
We are suffering from political AIDS.
Add George Wills’ entertaining analysis of the Detroit situation. He quotes a 19th C entomologist:
“The ichneumon fly inserts an egg in a caterpillar, and the larva hatched from the egg gnaws the inside of the caterpillar, and though at last it has devoured almost every part of it except the skin and intestines, carefully all this time avoids injuring the vital organs, as if aware that its own existence depends on that of the insect on which it preys!”
Then:
“Government employees’ unions living parasitically on Detroit have been less aware than ichneumon larvae. About them, and their collaborators in the political class, the question is: What. Were. They. Thinking?”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-f-will-detroits-death-by-democracy/2013/07/31/74a109c2-f94a-11e2-afc1-c850c6ee5af8_story.html
The name actually is more generic. Its “DEMOCRATS.”
We have a candidate who intends to fight this but he needs your money to get elected: http://www.DaveRosa2014.com
Sorry for the bleg but this is critical.
One easy way to fix this is to change the rule for when a pension starts to pay out — make it the same as Social Security.
Yes, yes, you can retire at 55 or 60 or 47 or whenever you like — but you don’t draw your government-provided pension until you’re 63 or 67. In the meantime you’re free to work. Somewhere else.
How about eliminating government unions?
Howie Carr just wrote a pretty good piece about T pensions.
Just as one example, here in Detroit police officers who are found to be wholly or partially disabled (and the definition of “disabled” is not a stringent one) can retire on a substantial percentage of their last pay…or in some cases, on full pay.
In many of these cases the policemen are not in chronic pain, fully ambulatory, and could be put on desk or other administrative work. Instead we pay the cops not to work at all and then hire civilians to do the work the cops could do.
I don’t think I’m being unsympathetic to the police, or ignoring the dangerous and necessary work that they do, to state that I see no necessary reason why a policeman who has sufficient health to do administrative work comfortably should not do so…no reduction in pay or benefits, of course.