For decades, I've watched unions, both private-sector and
public-service, collude with the Democratic Party to boost salaries,
benefits, and pensions to levels unattainable to the average non-union American
worker, all the time wondering, "How the hell are they ever going to keep
that going?" For years, when we encountered one of those big,
lumbering, quarter-million-dollar motor homes, my wife and I would joke, "There
goes another retired lawyer or doctor." These days, based on
publicly available data, our speculation is that it's likely a retired cop or
fireman.
We visited old college friends a couple of years ago at
their very nice home on a lush fairway in the desert southwest. He's a
retired public utility worker and union official, while she's a school
administrator. While he was showing me the yard, I spotted a two-story
Spanish Colonial-style mansion across the fairway and observed, "Looks
like you have some very well-to-do neighbors." His response was,
"That? Nah, he's a retired fireman." Today I spoke with
my brother in California about this situation, and he informed me that he has
seen on open public records that retired fire department captains in his home
town are drawing $130,000 per year from the public trough.
Are you beginning to see my concern?
You don’t have to be an actuary to calculate that the
American dream many of these generously retired union workers, especially those
from the public-service unions, are living is completely unsustainable,
assuredly for coming generations, but most likely for current retirees as well.
And that's despite all the desperate attempts by the unions' Democrat
cronies to raise taxes, tolls, and public fees to fund the exorbitant salaries,
benefits, and pensions of public-service employees and to pressure unionized
industries into equally lucrative contracts for their blue-collar workers.
Look at almost any major municipality in the so-called blue
states, especially those cities that have been under Democrat control for
decades, and you’ll likely find a looming pension crisis; ditto for private
sector unions in those same states. But don't even think about suggesting
a reasonable reduction in those salaries, benefits, and pensions to either the
totally intransigent unions or their Democrat cronies, who will assure you they
have some magical way to accomplish the impossible. There's a deepening
reservoir of impossible-to-keep retirement commitments in those blue states
being held back by a dam of desperate and disingenuous Democrat denial.
And now comes what may be a small leak portending that
pension dam disaster, which, when it breaks, is going to sweep away generations
of American dreams in the fiscal waves and torrents of all that pent up
political cronyism and greed. The Washington Post just reported that an
ironworkers union in Ohio is doing the unthinkable: reducing
benefits to its current pensioners, some by as much as 60%, to prevent the
fund from sinking into insolvency as soon as 2024. According to the Post, these ironworkers make up
only a tiny slice of the more than a million private-sector workers and
retirees whose pension funds are predicted to be insolvent within twenty years.
One of the largest, the Central States Pension Fund, which represents
some 300,000 truckers, has already tried to reduce pensions but has been
stymied in that effort by the federal government, which says the proposed cuts
are insufficient to save the fund from insolvency.
It's a good bet that Chicago will be the first major
Democrat stronghold to default on its public-service union retirement
commitments, but it's a sure bet that it is the entire State of California that
is sitting on the nuclear incident of pension plan insolvencies, and when that
Democrat unicorn reactor ultimately goes critical and melts down, as it most
assuredly is going to do, it will shake this nation. We can hope it
shakes some sense into Democrats and makes unions think twice about getting too
greedy, but based on current attitudes, it's not likely.
It will be interesting to see if all those retirees who get
their fat pensions drastically reduced will still be voting slavishly Democrat
when basic math wrapped around the hard fist of reality smacks them hard in the
kisser.
